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 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
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 A MODERN ULYSSES, 
 
 BEING 
 
 THE LIFE, LOVES, ADVENTURES, AND 
 
 STRANGE EXPERIENCES OF 
 
 HORACE DURAND. 
 
 BY 
 
 JOSEPH HATTON, 
 
 AUTHOR OF " THREE RECRUITS," " TO DAY IN AMERICA," " CLYTIE, 
 " THE QUEEN OF BOHEMIA," ETC. 
 
 IN THREE VOLUMES. 
 VOL. I. 
 
 LONDON: 
 
 CHAPMAN & HALL, Limited, 11, HENRIETTA ST„ 
 
 COVENT GARDEN. 
 
 1883. 
 
 [All Rights jReterved.}
 
 WESTMINSTER: 
 
 NICHOLS AND SONS, PRINTERS, 
 
 26, PARLIAMENT STREET.
 
 V.I 
 
 DEDICATORY PREFACE. 
 
 TO 
 
 HIS MAJESTY THE KING OF KUTUTU, 
 
 ^, SUZERAIN OF THE BULONAGAN ISLANDS, &C. 
 
 Cvi 
 
 ^ Sire, 
 
 I have the honour to address you 
 from England, the centre of civilisation and 
 t- power. 
 
 ^ The chief purpose of my letter is to 
 ^ introduce to your Majesty's notice the three 
 ^ accompanying volumes, which, among other 
 things, give a faithful account of my expe- 
 riences in the Bulonagan islands and the 
 ^ Eastern Seas. 
 
 The alleged Irishism of writing a letter 
 and being the bearer of it oneself, in this 
 instance, loses its point. There is as yet no 

 
 VI DEDICATORY PREFACE. 
 
 postal service between Europe and Kututu. 
 You wield the sceptre of a paternal majesty 
 outside those specific ^^ resources of civilisa- 
 tion," allusion to which has so often supplied 
 a ^^ glittering generality" to the splendid 
 eloquence of an illustrious English Premier, 
 whose sympathies I hope to enlist in behalf 
 of your ^^ islands of the sun." It is, there- 
 fore, not at all strange that I should write to 
 you a letter in the hope that I may myself 
 deliver it, with the three volumes to which I 
 venture to append it as a dedication, in 
 grateful recognition of the services I have 
 received at your hands^ and as a tribute of 
 admiration and respect. 
 
 The ministers of our great and glorious 
 Queen, Victoria, have under consideration the 
 equipment of an expedition, with a view to 
 such a survey of Kututu and the Bulonagan 
 islands as may lead to the establishment of 
 commercial, and possibly even closer, rela- 
 tionship between your Government and that 
 of ** the old country," as you affectionately 
 designated —
 
 DEDICATORY PREFACE. VU 
 
 This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle, 
 
 This earth of Majesty, this seat of Mars, 
 
 This other Eden, demi-paradise ; 
 
 This fortress, built by Nature for herself. 
 
 Against infection and the hand of war ; 
 
 This happy brede of men, this little world ; 
 
 This precious stone set in the silver sea. 
 
 Which serves it in the office of a wall 
 
 Or as a moat defensive to a house, 
 
 Against the envy of less happy lands, 
 
 This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England." 
 
 When next we meet I shall have the 
 honour to explain to you how a number of 
 persons, whose souls are in their ledgers, pro- 
 pose to tunnel a pathway under '^ this scep- 
 ter ed isle," which shall render abortive its 
 defensive moat, and thus reduce ^^ this seat 
 of Mars" to the level of those unhappy 
 countries of the Continent, which, not being 
 blessed by Nature with a '^ silver sea " that 
 serves as a protective wall, are continually in 
 fear of, or suffering from, the piratical inroads 
 of neighbouring kingdoms, against whom 
 their artificial frontiers need the everlasting 
 guardianship of mighty armies, the main- 
 tenance of which saps the industrial strength
 
 VUl DEDICATORY PREFACE. 
 
 and retards the progress and prosperity of 
 both States and Empires. 
 
 I am disposed to believe that the govern- 
 ment of ^^this fortress built by Nature for 
 herself " will favourably entertain the pro- 
 posal of which you did me the honour to 
 make me the bearer, for the reason that at 
 the present time there is some jealousy of 
 the French, who are showing what is called 
 a Chauvinistic spirit of enterprise, which 
 conflicts with the policy of England, inas- 
 much as it is contended that we are the only 
 people who have any right to extend their 
 Imperial and Colonial possessions. 
 
 Whether this forecast of English action 
 should in the end be justified or not, I am on 
 the eve of setting out under very happy cir- 
 cumstances, in response to your Majesty's 
 invitation, and with a view to a complete 
 study of your administrative system, an 
 exploration of your country, and the esta- 
 blishment of regular communication, by way 
 of Manilla, between Hong Kong and Kututu. 
 In this enterprise I am supported and en-
 
 DEDICATORY PREFACE. IX 
 
 couraged by an excellent friend of mine, a 
 British merchant long since settled at 
 Manilla, and well known in the Eastern 
 Seas. If your Majesty's labours had not 
 been confined to a part of the world that 
 is, in spite of our boasted British enterprise, 
 literally unknown (and how can one wonder 
 at this when Newfoundland, the oldest Eng- 
 lish colony, and the nearest to the home 
 country, still remains unexplored?), you 
 would have been familiar with his name. He 
 is a traveller, trader, and scholar, and I shall 
 hope to be present when he has the felicity 
 to entertain your Majesty at his own house. 
 While referring to the drawbacks which 
 Kututu suffers in being outside the pale of 
 European or British civilisation, I am desir- 
 ous to remind your Catholic Majesty that this 
 isolated position also has its advantages. If 
 Kututu has no gas, it has an unclouded sky, 
 and a moon that meets with no eclipse from 
 cloud or fog. Though its commerce be limited, 
 it has no duns, no necessity for co-operative 
 stores, no joint stock companies, no bills of
 
 X DEDICATORY PREFACE. 
 
 exchange ; while its money is Nature's own 
 produce, and its Royal Exchange a proper 
 mart of barter. It is so long since you were 
 in England that it is possible you may hardly 
 appreciate, at their true value, the blessings of 
 an island in which there are no paupers, no 
 politics, no financial panics, no printing- 
 presses, no judges fired with the Coleridgian 
 ambition of addressing law-courts for fourteen 
 days at a stretch, no sculptor's quarrels, no 
 Parisian modistes (and I might say ^* im- 
 modests ") , and no land-laws, Irish or English ; 
 although, in respect of this last-mentioned 
 instance of blissful ignorance, I fear Kututu 
 may find in Bulonagan her own Irish difficulty. 
 It has been wisely said, that government 
 by a single individual would be the best 
 form of rule, given talent and integrity, and 
 the perpetuation thereof in the succession. 
 Illustration of this is found and quoted in 
 the only instance of absolutely perfect rule, 
 that of the Deity, '^ which is sole and unre- 
 stricted." I know that your Majesty believes 
 in this principle of a pure despotism, the
 
 DEDICATORY PREFACE. XI 
 
 weakness of which lies in the impossibility 
 of its perpetuation ; for there must be good 
 kings and bad kings, and those monarchs 
 who claim to be most specially selected by 
 the Lord himself are generally least worthy 
 of the confidence of their subjects. Kututu 
 is safe in your hands, but you lament the 
 absence of any possible successor who will 
 carry on your benign and benevolent govern- 
 ment. Hence your desire to invite such Euro- 
 pean intervention as shall keep the country 
 from relapsing into the barbarism that still 
 afflicts the neighbouring islands of the 
 Bulonagans. Forgive me if I question 
 whether a taste for blood is much worse than 
 an inordinate thirst for rum ; you have con- 
 sidered the situation from all sides, and be- 
 lieve in the rule that leans its back against 
 the Bank of England. So be it ! I shall do 
 my best to give effect to your opinions and 
 desires. 
 
 I remember that in one of our conversa- 
 tions you deplored that custom, and the low 
 state of Kututuan morals, should compel you
 
 Xll DEDICATORY PREFACE. 
 
 to own slaves. It was not then within my 
 knowledge that George Washington himself, 
 who founded the American Republic and 
 could not tell a lie, lived and died a slave- 
 owner. Let this fact reconcile you to your 
 position. I do not remember that the 
 Oriental fashion of the harem, which appears 
 to obtain at Kututu, was a subject that 
 you mentioned with regret. Possibly Bib- 
 lical warrant for the practice had already 
 commended it to your views of paternal 
 government. At the same time I venture 
 to remind your Majesty of a fundamental 
 law of progress, which permits no sys- 
 tems civil or ecclesiastical to exist, with- 
 out they move along '^ with the tide of 
 general improvement.'' The authority to 
 whom I am indebted for the phrasing of this 
 sentiment (a very simple philosopher, one 
 William Benton Clulow) also lays stress 
 upon ^' the firmest supports of princes and 
 statesmen being the general distribution of 
 moderate wealth, and the multiplication of 
 domestic comforts among the members of
 
 DEDICATORY PREFACE. Xlll 
 
 the community," and he contends '^ that it is 
 chiefly this circumstance which has hitherto 
 kept together the heterogeneous materials 
 composing the American population ; as to 
 the same cause may be attributed in no 
 small degree the tranquillity that has so long 
 prevailed in China, containing, according to 
 the most authentic accounts, about three 
 hundred and sixty millions of inhabitants." 
 It is plain, therefore, that the same measure 
 of material happiness may exist under even 
 a Despotic Monarchy as under a Republic, 
 provided something like a comparative 
 equalisation of property, and other none 
 the less important external advantages, are 
 kept in view. 
 
 If your Majesty were posted up to date 
 in the current literature of the time, I suspect 
 I should have had to quote the modern 
 philosophers Spencer, Arnold, Mallock, and 
 others. I am thankful it is as it is ; other- 
 wise I should have had to read their books, 
 instead of having merely skimmed them, with 
 the result that I am more than ever content
 
 XIV DEDICATORY PREFACE. 
 
 with the smattering of their predecessors 
 which I picked up at Breedon, a district of 
 England that is duly mentioned in the fol- 
 lowing chapters. I fear I prefer Tacitus to 
 Arnold, Voltaire to Spencer, Tom Payne to 
 Mallock, Adam Smith to Mongredien, and 
 the early works of George Eliot to the later 
 essays of Thomas Carlyle ; but I must confess 
 to you that I am not an educated man in the 
 academic sense of being educated. I may 
 therefore be glorifying myself in an ignor- 
 ance of which, under more favourable condi- 
 tions, I should be ashamed. 
 
 I envy your Majesty the delight of mak- 
 ing a first acquaintance with some of these 
 authors ; and I am vain enough to believe 
 that you may experience some pleasure in 
 the present work, which will be elevated in 
 the general estimation of the public by the 
 adornment it receives in being dedicated 
 to royalty, and more especially by one who 
 knows what it is to call a king his intimate 
 friend. A learned American traveller long 
 since discovered that emperors and kings.
 
 DEDICATORY PREFACE. XV 
 
 when one is fortunate enough to see them at 
 home, are very much like ordinary people. 
 He foimd them so pleasant and natural that 
 he never afterwards had any confidence in 
 the ^'tinsel kings of the theatres." When they 
 *^ swaggered round the stage" in jewelled 
 crowns and splendid robes, he felt bound to 
 observe that none of the monarchs with whom 
 he was personally acquainted put on airs or 
 '^ marched about in crowns and sceptres." I 
 call to mind the natural majesty of your 
 own demeanour when first I saw you. I re- 
 member your Majesty's pleasant familiarity 
 at the Cannibal Court of the Kututus ; and 
 I see you now, through the mists of morning, 
 dealing out certain unexhausted resources of 
 civilisation upon the revolted islanders of 
 your gentle suzerainty. On each occasion 
 you proved to me that a king may have as 
 generous a heart as an uncrowned hero, and 
 that a liberal-minded man sustains no neces- 
 sary disability, in his capacity for indivi- 
 dual friendships, by becoming an emperor. 
 I wish the work I now invite your Majesty
 
 XVI DEDICATORY PREFACE. 
 
 to read were entirely worthy of your atten- 
 tion. It is full of anachronisms and it has 
 many other short-comings. What they are 
 exactly I do not at present know. All England 
 will become acquainted with them, however, 
 when certain critical searchers after error 
 have reported thereon. Similarly, by virtue 
 of sympathies which make the whole world 
 kin, good things, which their author never 
 dreamed of, will also be discovered ; and 
 if this little fleet of three have not to bear 
 more weight of condemnation than such 
 light craft are constructed to carry in the 
 tempestuous seas of Public Opinion, then 
 they shall haply sail into many peaceful 
 ports, proclaiming to the world the hitherto un- 
 known kingdom of Kututu, and adding a new 
 name to the history of monarchs who are cele- 
 brated for their courage and magnanimity. 
 
 May it please your Majesty to permit me 
 to subscribe myself, 
 
 Your Majesty's faithful and 
 humble servant, 
 
 Horace Durand. 
 
 London, 1883.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 BOOK I, 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 I. " And Memory with hek Dreams shall come." 3 
 
 II. One of my earliest Adventures . . 19 
 
 III. Over the Hills and Far Away ... 39 
 
 IV. Funeral Chimes and Marriage Bells . 59 
 V My Uncle says I am a lucky Dog . . 76 
 
 VI What might have been .... 103 
 
 VII. Love and Marriage . . . . .116 
 
 VIII. Colonel Ernstone's Secret . . . 138 
 
 IX. The Mystery of Therese Ernstone . . 147 
 
 BOOK II. 
 
 I. Calypso's Island 159 
 
 II. Outside the Grotto 178 
 
 III. Inside the Grotto . . . . .194 
 
 IV. The Shadows of coming Revelations . 208 
 V. Sketch of Judith Travers . . . 226 
 
 VI. Colonel Ernstone to the Rescue . 232 
 
 VII. A Daniel come to Judgment . . . 240
 
 A MODEM ULYSSES 
 
 BOOK I. 
 
 There is no pleasure that I have experienced like a 
 child's Midsummer holiday — the time, I mean, ivhen two or 
 three of ns used to go away up the brook and take our 
 dinners with uSy and come home at night tired, happy, 
 scratched heyond recognition, with a great nosegay, three 
 little trout, and one shoe, the other having been used for a 
 boat till it had gone down ivith all hands out of soundings. 
 How poor our Derby days, our Greenwich dinners, our 
 evening parties, where there are plenty of nice girls, after 
 that! Depend upon it, a man never experiences such 
 pleasure or grief after fourteen years as he does before^ 
 unless in some cases, in his first love-making, when the 
 sensation is new to him. — Kingsley. 
 
 VOL. I. /« B 
 
 ^
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 ^^AND MEMORY TOO WITH HER DREAMS SHALL 
 COME." 
 
 ^' Is it a true story?" asked the little 
 fellow, looking up at the Frenchman, who 
 had laid aside his violoncello and was fight- 
 ing imaginary foes with his bow. 
 
 ^^True!" said thp Frenchman, ^^ every 
 word of it." 
 
 ^' Carky Jones says ' Jack the Giant 
 Killer ' and ' Cinderella ' are made up out of 
 somebody's head.'' 
 
 ^' She is of the earth earthy," said the 
 Frenchman, '^ and has not imaginations." 
 
 ^^Itow'd him they was made up, be- 
 cause he was for starting off hissen and 
 b2
 
 4 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 going on his ventures ; he's so fanciful," said 
 Carky Jones, a stolid Midland Counties 
 domestic. 
 
 " I was only wondering what there is at 
 the other end of the long road over the hills 
 yonder," said the boy. 
 
 '' There is always one long road over the 
 hills of life," said the Frenchman, ''which 
 we wonder about, but it is best to wait till 
 we get there." 
 
 '' Oh," said the boy, with a puzzled ex- 
 pression of face, " are those the hills of life, 
 yonder over the river and far away ?" 
 
 ''No, they are not so steep; we will 
 cross over those littler Alps one day and see 
 the grand Palace," said the Frenchman. 
 
 " Is the new story about the Palace ?" 
 
 " What, the adventures of Ulysses ? No, 
 when you are old enough to read F^n^lon 
 you will find that when Ulysses lived there 
 were no statues, no pictures, no painted 
 ceilings, only Nature with her flowers and 
 shells and vines and lovely caves, the one of 
 Calypso for example."
 
 MEMORY WITH HER DREAMS SHALL COME. O 
 
 ^^ Like Robinson Crusoe's island ?'' asked 
 the boy. 
 
 '^ Something of that kind," answered the 
 Frenchman. 
 
 ^^ Robinson Crusoe is true?" asked the 
 boy, with a certain suggestion of hope and 
 fear in the expression of his voice. 
 
 ^^ Just as true as Ulysses." 
 
 A sigh of relief announced the satisfac- 
 tion which the boy found in this statement. 
 
 '' And now. Monsieur of Many Questions, 
 shall I go on?" 
 
 '^ If you please, father," said the boy, who 
 was lying upon a rug by the old-fashioned fire- 
 place, his chin resting between his two hands, 
 his black eyes fixed upon the story-teller. 
 
 It was a pretty domestic picture, this 
 scene in the early days of Horace Durand, 
 which was the name of the boy who believed 
 in Robinson Crusoe and wondered what there 
 might be beyond the white road, over the hills 
 that shut out from the world the little town 
 where lie was born. Let me try and enable 
 the reader to realise it.
 
 6 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 An old-fashioned room, wainscoted in 
 oak ; a bay window, looking out upon 
 garden, lawn, river, and hills ; opposite the 
 bay window an open fireplace, with a low 
 settle or seat, shadowed by an abutting man- 
 telshelf. Doors on both sides of the room. 
 Near the window, a round table. Carky 
 Jones, a ruddy stoutly -built servant, is laying 
 a service of blue and white china upon 
 the round table. Close by, sitting ujDon a 
 higli-backed chair, and with her feet upon 
 a velvet hassock, is a pretty young woman of 
 about three-and-twenty. She is netting with 
 coloured wools. A fair young creature, with 
 brown hair and blue eyes, she is somewhat 
 gaily attired, and wears more jewelry than 
 is in keeping with her quiet artistic sur- 
 roundings. 
 
 By the fireplace sits a middle-aged 
 gentleman, French in appearance and man- 
 ner. A spare and somewhat ascetic figure, 
 his features are sharp and pronounced ; 
 dark sunken eyes under strongly marked 
 brows, a prominent nose with delicately
 
 MEMORY WITH HER DREAMS SHALL COME. 7 
 
 moulded nostrils, a mouth betokening more 
 refinement than strength of character, a 
 shaven face, iron-grey haii^ closely croj)ped. 
 His coat of brown cloth, with bronzed 
 buttons, is high in the collar, cut dress- 
 fashion, and with tight sleeves. He wears a 
 cream-coloured cravat pinned with an antique 
 cameo brooch, and now and then he takes 
 the smallest imaginable pinch of snuff from 
 the smallest imaginable gold snuff-box. By 
 his side is a music-stand, and near it lies 
 a violoncello. In one hand he holds a closed 
 book in a French vellum binding ; and he 
 is conducting, as it were, his conversation 
 with his cello bow. On the floor, upon a thick 
 but well-worn Indian rug, reclines a dark- 
 haired boy of seven, in a marone velvet frock, 
 with an antique lace frill falling around the 
 throat, and giving additional prominence to 
 the tangled dull black hair that partly fringes 
 the boy's swarthy face and falls upon his 
 shoulders ; his legs are bare to the knee, ex- 
 cept as regards the covering of a pair of 
 short socks and buckled shoes.
 
 8 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 In a recess behind the cello-player is a 
 square piano, upon which are scattered a few 
 sheets of music, several pencil designs for 
 lace, some water-colour sketches, a news- 
 paper, sundry books, and a handful of neg- 
 lected laburnums, ^^Whitsun bosses*' and 
 lilacs, that betoken a want of love for flowers 
 on the part of the pretty lady sitting by the 
 window. 
 
 *^At the stern of his solitary ship sat 
 Ulysses," went on the cello-player, reading 
 from his book, and only betraying his nation- 
 ality by a slight accent, and the occasional ad- 
 dition of the plural number to nouns singular, 
 ^^ and he steered right artfully. He saw the 
 stars which are called the Pleiade and the 
 Bear, by some called the Wain, that moves 
 about Orion ; he saw the slow-setting sign, 
 the Bootes, which some call the Waggoner ; 
 and for seventeen days he held his course. 
 The next day the coast of Phoeacia was in 
 sight looking like a shield. Neptune saw him, 
 and to revenge him, because Ulysses had 
 blinded his brutal sire, Polyphemus, he
 
 MEMORY WITH HER DREAMS SHALL COME. 9 
 
 raised a mighty storm and wrecked his 
 ship, drowning all but Ulysses, who was 
 saved by swimming with a girdle round 
 him that Ino, a sea-goddess, had sent 
 for his protection. After many perils from 
 blinding surf and rocks that resisted his land- 
 ing, he was washed ashore at last on the 
 banks of the river that flowed into the sea 
 from the land of King Alcinous, whose 
 daughter found him in his distress, and 
 invited him to her father's palace." 
 
 " The one at the end of the white road, 
 over the hills yonder?" asked the boy, in a 
 low voice, as if unwilling to interrupt the 
 story, but too anxious about what was on the 
 other side of the hills to resist asking the 
 question. 
 
 " No, another one more strange, but not 
 so beautiful," was the answer. 
 
 ^' Thank you, father," said the boy, '' go 
 on, please." 
 
 ^^And no one knew him; but the king 
 showed him great attention, not only because 
 he was g-od-like in build and srraciousness,
 
 10 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 but also because in those days strangers were 
 honoured, as if they might be angels in dis- 
 guise, and beggars even were fed and clothed. 
 That was in the time before this town of Scars- 
 dale was, or anything civilised in Britain, 
 where even now they have not yet learnt 
 how to honour the strangers within their 
 gates. But the courtiers falling to converse 
 about Ulysses, and his brave companions 
 who had fallen by the way, he was over- 
 come at the memory of their sufferings. His 
 tears betrayed him, and at last, out of grati- 
 tude for the kindness of the king, and his 
 daughter the princess, he said, * King Al- 
 cinous, I will no longer keep you in ignorance 
 of my name and quality : I am Ulysses, that 
 unhappy man whom the heavens and angry 
 gods have conspired to keep an exile on the 
 seas, wandering in search of my home which 
 still flies from me.' All the Court was seized 
 with admiration to behold in their presence 
 one of those heroes who fought at Troy, 
 whose sublime story had been made known 
 to them by songs and tales, which they
 
 MEMORY WITH HER DREAMS SHALL COME. 11 
 
 thought, as Carky Jones thinks about Jack 
 and Cinderella, were made up out of some- 
 body's head, as she says ; but seeing the real 
 Ulysses, who gave them proof of his power by 
 flinging the quoit, and other feats of strength, 
 they now knew that the story of Troy and 
 the mighty horse of Helen and Achilles and 
 the rest was true ; so they were all very happy 
 listening to the history of his adventures, and, 
 in the end, they helped him home in their 
 glorious ships, for these Phceacians were the 
 English of the classic world, as far as com- 
 manding the ocean is concerned, and the 
 Greeks were the French, my ancestors and 
 yours." 
 
 ^'And my mother's?" asked the boy, 
 glancing his black eyes towards the pretty 
 woman who had let her netting fall upon 
 her knee, and was apparently gazing at that 
 road over the hills which the boy had so 
 often referred to. 
 
 ^' Your mother is the sweet and gracious 
 link that binds our ancestry of France to her 
 people of England, and gives to you tlie
 
 12 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 British heart that is good and true, and with 
 the head that is cool associates a chivalric 
 mind, a taste for art, a noble nature, and the 
 instinct to be a gentleman, such as all the 
 heroes were of whom the great Homer has 
 written." 
 
 '^ Oh !" said the boy, puzzled more than 
 he liked to say, lest his father should wander 
 still further from the narrative in hand. 
 
 '' And Ulysses was always encouraged in 
 his efforts to overcome all tilings that kept 
 him away from his home with the know- 
 ledge that his loving wife and his dear son, 
 his Penelope and Telemachus, his Emily 
 and his Horace, were waiting for him whom 
 they loved so truly, as he them. He did 
 not know how sore beset they were, these 
 two who were all the world to him and he 
 to them, enemies all around them, enemies in 
 his very palace, conspiring against mother 
 and son to afflict her with what is worse than 
 death, and to kill his Horace, who stood 
 fast in defence of the honour of his father. 
 If I your father being away in foreign lands
 
 MEMORY WITH HER DREAMS SHALL COME. 18 
 
 had my good name assailed while my 
 enemies assembled here to be cruel to your 
 mother, you would fight for us, would you 
 not ? " 
 
 ^' Till I died! " exclaimed the boy, starting 
 to his feet, flinging himself into his father's 
 arms, and bursting into tears. 
 
 ^' Ah! my son: Courage! ^(^to, this is 
 not well. Do not cry. Tout beau. Emily, 
 see, I have made him weep. What shall I 
 do ? Ah, come Horace, you are too tender 
 hearted. Come, come ! Farhleu! If you cry 
 at this you will never be a man to fight the 
 world. Courage, mon cJier! Courage ! '' 
 
 The old man pressed the boy to his heart 
 and looked at his wife with a smile half sad, 
 half joyous; for it touched him nearly to 
 have such interesting evidence of his son's 
 sensibility to both love and courage as he 
 saw in the result of his dramatic appeal to 
 the little fellow's feelings. 
 
 Just as Mrs. Durand was getting uj), for 
 Monsieur beckoned to her with his head, 
 intimating his desire that she should sooth 
 the Jioy who was still fobbing in his arms, a
 
 14 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 constant visitor at Oakfield House was an- 
 nounced, and entered on the words '' Mr. 
 Welby." 
 
 '^ Ah ! " he exclaimed, in his hearty 
 genial way, ^' What is the matter? What! 
 Horace crying ! " 
 
 '^No, Sir," said the boy, struggling from 
 his father's arms and brushing his tears away, 
 '^ I am not crying.'' 
 
 '' That's right," said Mr. Welby, patting 
 the boy on the head with one hand, shaking 
 hands with Mrs. Durand with the other, and 
 smiling affably on her husband. 
 
 '' Horace is a dear boy," said his father, 
 ' ' but sensitive. Never mind, Horace, a man 
 is the braver in a good cause when his heart 
 as also his hand is engaged." 
 
 ^^A capital sentiment. Max," said Mr. 
 Welby. 
 
 " Will you take tea with us, Mr. Welby ? " 
 asked Mrs. Durand, speaking for the first 
 time for an hour at least. 
 
 ^' Thank you, yes, I came for the pur- 
 pose," said Welby, rubbing his hands blithely 
 and showing his white teeth.
 
 MEMORY WITH HEK DREAMS SHALL COME. 15 
 
 ^^ Well done, that is good of you. Welby, 
 tres bieUj you make yourself at home. That is 
 right. I have been telling Horace the story 
 of Ulysses, and for a moment putting myself 
 in the place of the illustrious Greek ; and 
 making as if he was Telemachus and his 
 mother Penelope, I say to him would you 
 not fight for the honour of your father and 
 to protect your mother, and he cry out ^ till I 
 die,' and then burst into tears ! Wliat do you 
 think of that ? " 
 
 For a moment Welby did not speak. 
 
 '^Ridiculous," said Mrs. Durand, ''you 
 fill the boy's head with nonsense, Maximilian ; 
 he will be a man before he is a boy." 
 
 "It is very good nonsense, my dear 
 Emily, and will not hurt him either as man 
 or boy," said Monsieur. 
 
 '*No, that's true," said Mr. Welby, 
 " quite true. I read the Iliad and the Odys- 
 sey, through and through, when I was a lad, 
 and they never hurt me, not even the song 
 the old fellow sang before Llysses at — let 
 me see — where was it ? At King Alcinous'
 
 16 A MODERN ULYSSES 
 
 place of course. Oh no, my dear Mrs. 
 Durand, it is best to let b©ys know every - 
 tliinir. 
 
 5> 
 
 '' But Horace is only an infant yet, one 
 of Dame Skinner's youngest pupils," said 
 Mrs. Durand. 
 
 ^^I don't like Dame Skinner," said the 
 boy, ^'she whips children." 
 
 ^' Only naughty ones,'' said the mother, 
 taking the boy on her knee and smoothing 
 his collar and pulling up his socks. 
 
 ^^ She shall nevaire whip you, Horace, 
 only once, however," said Monsieur, ^'I would 
 whip her pretty much and very quick." 
 
 '' Whip a woman. Max ! No, you would 
 not do that," said Welby, taking a seat at 
 the round table in the window. 
 
 '^ Then let her not whip Horace, that is 
 all," said Maximilian Durand, my father as 
 you must have guessed already; for that 
 black-haired child in the velvet frock is 
 your humble servant the author of this 
 history, upon the threshold of which you and 
 he are contemplating this little group toying
 
 MEMORY WCTir HEK DREAMS SHALL COME. 17 
 
 with Fate on tlie border-land of a troubled 
 future. 
 
 The twilight gathers in restful hues of 
 grey, as the people who open this story of 
 real life sit around the table in the pleasant 
 bay window of Oakfield House, so far away 
 and yet so near in time and in reality that I 
 live again in that youth of the velvet frock. 
 
 Mr. Jonas Welby was the junior partner 
 of the firm that owned the then famous 
 Scarsdale lace factory. My father was the 
 designer of their patterns, and the inventor 
 of several of their processes of manufacture. 
 How he came to be in England and the 
 husband of the belle of Scarsdale, and how I 
 came at length to hate Jonas Welby, will be 
 made amply manifest as the scenes shift and 
 the play goes on. 
 
 Meanwhile let us keep in our mind this 
 first picture of love and friendship, this happy 
 home with its artistic surroundings ; and 
 while fate changes the scene and puts on the 
 next you shall beguile the time with the music 
 of that violoncello which my father takes up 
 VOL. I. c
 
 18 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 by the desire of his friend, my mother 
 following the tender melody of a Brittany 
 ballad with an accompaniment upon the 
 little square piano where the lilac and 
 laburnums faint and die for lack of water. 
 I see myself sitting in the window listening 
 to the sweet familiar strain and watching the 
 twilight melt away beneath the rising moon.
 
 19 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 ONE OF MY EARLIEST ADVENTURES. 
 
 We all of us remember, with the liveliest 
 particularity, incidents that belong to the 
 earliest days of our lives. 
 
 Our first morning at school, our first 
 jacket, the first fish that rewarded our angle, 
 our earliest joys and sorrows ; they will com- 
 pete with recollections that belong to far 
 more serious days, and hold their own against 
 memories of battle, murder, and sudden 
 death. That strangely opportune incident 
 of pledging myself to defend my father's 
 good name, just as the shadow of Jonas 
 Welby must have been falling on our door- 
 way, how vividly it comes back to me now ! 
 c2
 
 20 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 But we will dismiss that memory at 
 present to recall my first adventure, since it 
 is not uninteresting in itself and has been 
 regarded as indicative of qualities that have 
 pushed me into strange and sometimes un- 
 toward situations. 
 
 You will have gathered that my infantine 
 instinct prompted in me a dislike to Dame 
 Skinner, .at whose educational establishment, 
 not more than a stone's-throw from Oakfield 
 House, I had just graduated in words of 
 four syllables when the following trouble 
 occurred. Under the shadow of tragic 
 events I still recall the excitement of the end 
 of my first month under the Skinner regime 
 as if it were yesterday. 
 
 ^^He called me a guy, did he?" ex- 
 claimed Mrs. Skinner, removing her spec- 
 tacles and taking up a cane, which she flung 
 from her desk to the end of the school-room. 
 
 ^^ Yes, marm!" shouted six small boys 
 all at once ; ^^ an old guy, marm ! " 
 
 ^^ Fetch it, Horace Durand, fetch it!" 
 commanded the injured lady.
 
 ONE OF MY EARLIEST ADVENTURES. 21 
 
 It was the custom of Mrs. Skinner in 
 extreme cases of insubordination to assert 
 her authority and enforce discipline to comj^el 
 rebellious pupils to carry the cane with which 
 she punished them. 
 
 A black-headed, sturdy little fellow, in a 
 velvet frock and lace collar, I can see my 
 defiant little self pick up that terrible instru- 
 ment of torture, which was Mrs. Skinner's 
 symbol of power, the sceptre of her despotic 
 authority, and carry it to madame. I can 
 hear the buzz of fear and expectation which 
 notified the extreme interest of the school in 
 the fate that awaited me. I can see the 
 laburnum blossoms, like a golden framework 
 fringing the open window, and the distant 
 hills looking like clouds far away. I can see 
 the butterfly that poised above one of the 
 yellow blossoms, and I am conscious, even 
 nov/, of the j)erfume that came in through 
 the open window, from an unseen bank of 
 gilliflowers in the little garden that bor- 
 dered the pathway to the portals of the 
 school.
 
 22 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 '^Well, Sir!" said Mrs. Skinner, taking 
 her sceptre, and switching it above her head 
 and making the pliant thing fairly whistle, 
 ^^ what have you to say for yourself ?" 
 
 ^^ If you please, marm, Tommy Barnes 
 said didn't I think you an old guy, and I 
 said yes, marm." 
 
 *^ I don't believe it," she answered 
 promptly, " Tommy Barnes is an honest 
 English boy, and will tell me the truth; 
 did you say what he says. Tommy Barnes?" 
 ^^ No, marm," answered the young ruffian 
 in question. 
 
 ^^ 1 believe you," said Mrs. Skinner, ^^ but 
 let this be a warning to you." 
 
 Then, turning again to me, she said, ^*And 
 do you think me an old guy, Master Durand, 
 do you?'' 
 
 ^^ I am very sorry I said so," I answered, 
 *^ but I don't like your cap, and Carky 
 Jones does not." 
 
 '^ Oh, indeed," said the old lady, who 
 must have been sorely hurt at this artless 
 confession, for, above all things, she was
 
 ONE OF MY EARLIEST ADVENTURES. 23 
 
 particularly proud of her caps. They were 
 wonders of net, and starch, and ribbons. 
 
 '^ Carky Jones thinks it is too gay for an 
 old dame ! " 
 
 ^' Does she ? Very well then we will see 
 if this cane is too "gay for a half-bred little 
 savage, who is neither French nor English. 
 Come here, you impudent young repro- 
 bate ! " 
 
 With that she caught me by the shoulders 
 and beat me. At first I was resolved not to 
 cry, but the dear vain old woman made me 
 howl before she had avenged her lace and 
 ribbons. 
 
 Then she compelled me to stand behind 
 her chair. What hurt me more than her cane 
 was her scoffing reference to my origin and 
 parentage. The boys of Scarsdale all called 
 rae '' Frenchy " except those who called me 
 ^' gipsy." I was neither the one nor the 
 other ; but my father was of French descent, 
 and spoke with a slight accent, and my 
 mother dressed me somewhat fantastically, 
 compared with the generally cheap and
 
 24 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 slovenly fashion of the uncultivated little 
 Midland town in which I was born. 
 
 During the French war my father's grand- 
 father was a prisoner on his parole at Scars- 
 dale, and, on his release, had married an 
 English wife, and gone home to Normandy. 
 My father, when a child, had heard his 
 grandfather talk of England, and particu- 
 larly of Scarsdale. Coming here to see the 
 Midlands during a holiday tour in England, 
 he visited the lace factory, then just com- 
 mencing work. Speaking the English lan- 
 guage, which his grandfather had carried 
 home with him, he disclosed, in his con- 
 versation with one of the chiefs of the firm, 
 a certain special knowledge of lace-making 
 which would be invaluable at Scarsdale. 
 They made my father a very handsome 
 offer of employment. He resisted it at first. 
 He was a man of some means, and a bachelor ; 
 money was therefore no particular attraction 
 to him. It was summer time, and Scarsdale 
 looked its best. The senior partner of the 
 Scarsdale lace factory invited my father to
 
 ONE OF MY EARLIEST ADVENTURES. 25 
 
 an evening party. He met my mother there, 
 and lie never returned any more to Nor- 
 mandy. 
 
 I have heard my mother tell the story ; 
 how the young men sneered at the mar- 
 riage, because my father was nearly old 
 enough to be her father ; and how the girls 
 considered they were revenged upon her, for 
 that previously she had been the acknow- 
 ledged belle of Scarsdale. People used to 
 remark that I was not like my mother. ^* A 
 chip of the old block," Welby would say, 
 patting my head, and I now remember that 
 he would slightly emphasise the adjective 
 whenever he said this in my mother's pre- 
 sence and my father was not there. 
 
 It is a singular fact that the stolid youth of 
 Scarsdale seemed to disapprove of this likeness 
 to my father. They referred to it in uncompli- 
 mentary term. "Frenchy '' and ''frog-eater " 
 were ever on their lips. Some of them called 
 me Mounseer. When I was old enough to 
 defend myself, some of them had reason to 
 regret their taunts, Tommy Barnes to wit :
 
 26 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 indeed, as this chapter will show, he came 
 in for a very early taste of my budding 
 resentments. 
 
 To-day sitting down to write the story 
 of my life, I can hardly realise the fact that 
 the sobbing urchin standing behind Mrs. 
 Skinner's high-backed chair is myself. And 
 yet I recall, with as lively a recollection as if 
 it were but yesterday, the sudden shout of 
 the same six traitors who had unjustly con- 
 demned me to the torture of the Skinner 
 rod, ^^ He's shaking his fist at you, marm ! '' 
 I suppose this was true, though I do not re- 
 member having done it. Possibly I did, for 
 as the smart of the stick began to decline 
 the smart of my indignation began to in- 
 crease. 
 
 ^' He's making faces too, marm,'' cried 
 Tommy Barnes. 
 
 ^^ You good-for-nothing!" exclaimed 
 Mrs. Skinner, '' you are a disgrace to 
 the school ! You shall undergo the block 
 punishment and we will see what that will 
 do for you. If that does not succeed in
 
 ONE OF MY EARLIEST ADVENTURES. 27 
 
 casting forth tlie French spirit of evil that 
 possesses you, the rats and mice shall have 
 a chance of bringing you to your senses.'' 
 
 The block punishment was not peculiar 
 to Mrs. Skinner's establishment ; it was com- 
 mon in most of the dames' schools of my 
 youth. ' In later years when I was interested 
 in the management of a certain public 
 journal I commissioned a clever writer to go 
 about the country and find out if "dames' 
 schools " existed in these days of my man- 
 hood, and if so to expose the cruelties prac- 
 tised by the Skinners thereof, the canings, 
 the ear-pullings, the hammering of heads 
 with thimbles, the pinchings, the dark- hole 
 punishments, and other atrocities inflicted on 
 the rising generation when I was a boy in 
 Midlandshire. The block torture was a very 
 mild business compared with the horrors 
 that lay beyond the committal to confine- 
 ment in Mrs. Skinner's cellar, where it was 
 believed by Mrs. Skinner's pupils, and 
 vouched for by her eldest and weakest-kneed 
 scholar, that once upon a time a very
 
 28 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 wicked boy was eaten alive by the rats and 
 mice which were always gathered together 
 in the dark waiting for another similar meal. 
 Circe's description of the insatiate Scylla 
 was not more terrible, in the imagination of 
 Ulysses, than the horrors of the darkest corner 
 of Mrs. Skinner's cellar were to me. The block 
 punishment, however, was nothing if you 
 practised for it, as some of the Skinner 
 pupils did. The result of my first ex- 
 perience of it led to a greater isolation of 
 the criminal than had hitherto been deemed 
 necessary. You had to stand upon a form 
 in the middle of the school, and hold up, in 
 each hand, a block of wood, your arms being 
 extended to their fullest stretch above your 
 head. I was placed between Tommy Barnes 
 and Sarah Smith, who were sitting learning 
 their lessons. I cried a little when my arms 
 began to ache, and, glancing down in search 
 of a sympathetic face. Tommy Barnes looked 
 up and grinned at me. His cruel mouth had 
 not completed its scoffing distortion before 
 the block of wood fell from my riglit hand
 
 ONE OF MY EARLIEST ADVENTURES. 29 
 
 crash upon his face. The yell which he 
 made was almost eclipsed by the shout of 
 laughter which announced my fiendish or 
 childish delight at his just suffering. But 
 when I saw the blood streaming from his 
 long thin nose I was afraid. The school- 
 room door was a little way open, to let in 
 the quiet summer breeze that was stirring 
 the flowers and wafting their perfumes into 
 the adjacent street. I leaped from the form, 
 dropping the other block upon Sarah Smith's 
 toes, and made for the open air. On the very 
 threshold of freedom Mrs. Skinner's servant 
 caught me in her bony grip, and pushed 
 me back upon the scene of my murderous 
 outrage. 
 
 Dispatching my captor for a bowl of hot 
 water in which to bathe Tommy Barnes's 
 mutilated face, Mrs. Skinner took me by 
 the shoulders and led me forth to tJie 
 dungeon. 
 
 '' Wicked murderous boys who will other- 
 wise come to the gallows had better be eaten 
 up in dark cellars,'' she said.
 
 30 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 The school was huslied as I passed out 
 through the private door leading into Mrs. 
 Skinner's house. Even Tommy Barnes 
 ceased his howling as I went forth to execu- 
 tion. 
 
 Since those days I have seen perils by 
 land and water, abroad and at home, but 
 fear and courage have never fought in my 
 mind a harder contest than that which agi- 
 tated me at this moment. If Providence had 
 not so ordained it that childhood should have 
 the special faculty of quickly forgetting its 
 troubles, in the joy of its simple pleasures, 
 boys and girls would become candidates for 
 lunatic asylums, or die of broken hearts. 
 
 A philosophic writer discoursing of child- 
 hood has touched this by no means original 
 idea with an apt illustration. ^^A child," 
 he says, ^^ is purely happy because he knows 
 no evil, nor hath made means by sin to be 
 acquainted with misery. He arrives not at 
 the mischief of being wise, nor endures evils 
 to come by foreseeing them. He kisses and 
 loves all, and, when the smart of the rod is
 
 ONE OF MY EARLIEST ADVENTURES. e31 
 
 past, smiles on his beater.'' Does he? Some- 
 times, perhaps. It depends, of course, who 
 the beater is, and whether the punishment 
 is just, for childhood has a keen sense of 
 wrong. I never smiled on Mrs. Skinner 
 again, nor would I have done so, on any con- 
 sideration, unless I had had the gift of 
 smiling and killing while I smiled. As she 
 pushed me before her to the dungeon I 
 noticed that there was a long red bruise upon 
 my arm, one of several which the strokes of 
 the cane had made upon my tender flesh. 
 
 I remember the agonising fear that fell 
 upon me as I was hustled along a passage, 
 pushed into a dark place, and a door was 
 shut and locked upon me. I shouted and 
 screamed and kicked, imagining all kinds of 
 horrors, and no doubt hardening Mrs. Skin- 
 ner's heart by my cries. Presently, as no 
 one came to my rescue and no rats attacked 
 my naked legs, I summoned up sufficient 
 courage to look around. I discovered that I 
 was in a pantry that gave upon the cellar 
 stairs. The pantry was quite a large one.
 
 32 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 dimly lighted by a grating. This was a 
 comforting discovery. As my eyes grew 
 more and more accustomed to the darkness, 
 and the importance of the light that struggled 
 in through the grating seemed to increase, I 
 observed that almost within reach, on one 
 of the shelves, there were some cheese-cakes 
 and part of an open tart. It occurred to 
 me to wonder why the rats and mice had 
 not carried these dainties off to their holes 
 and dens in the cellar below. I dried my 
 eyes and peered into other corners of my 
 prison. There was meat on another of the 
 pantry shelves, and on the floor a large 
 earthenware pan, full of cups and saucers 
 and plates, which the cruel bony servant who 
 had intercepted my retreat, and thus caused 
 my incarceration, no doubt ought to have 
 washed and put away after breakfast, instead 
 of huddling them into the pantry out of Mrs. 
 Skinner's sight. Carky Jones was right, 
 the Skinner servant was as idle as she was 
 ugly : that was one of the discoveries I had 
 completed in my dungeon.
 
 ONE OF MY EARLIEST ADVENTUKES. 33 
 
 It seemed as if an hour had elaj)sed dur- 
 ing my exploration of the pantry. The 
 rats not putting in an appearance I feared 
 them no longer ; but presently I heard the 
 children leave school for dinner, and the 
 thought of it made me hungry. I kicked at 
 the door. Nobody responded to my noisy 
 demand to be let out. It dawned upon me 
 that I was probably locked up for the day, 
 perhaps for the night also. Under these 
 circumstances I thought it justifiable to eat 
 a cheese-cake. Even light food of that kind 
 would, at all events, check sheer starvation. 
 Cai'ky Jones had told me a story of an old 
 woman who, being locked up for a witch, was 
 starved to death. I was determined that I 
 would not share a similar fate so long as 
 dame Skinner's cheese-cakes lasted. I felt 
 sure that neither my father nor mother would 
 approve of my fainting and dying in the 
 midst of plenty. Dame Skinner's cheese- 
 cakes were very good, however bad she might 
 be in my infantile imagination. I ate another 
 and another. Then I took a respite. It 
 
 VOL. I. D
 
 34 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 occurred to me that it would not be advisable 
 to consume all the provisions at once. It 
 would be time enough to devour the last of 
 the tarts and begin upon the more solid food 
 so soon as I experienced the first pangs of 
 starvation. 
 
 After a little while longer I began to 
 think of home, and my mother, and Carky 
 Jones, my attendant from the first days I can 
 remember and my mother's most devoted 
 servant. They would be alarmed if I did 
 not soon return. My father would be very 
 anxious about me, I felt sure, the dear kind 
 gentleman that he was. I therefore thought 
 how I might escape. There was a cellar 
 window below, but the idea of penetrating 
 that awful abyss on the way to the window 
 appalled me. Ulysses and the Cyclops oc- 
 curred to me. After all Mrs. Skinner's cellar 
 was paradise compared with the cave of the 
 one-eyed giant. Ulysses escaped by strategy, 
 so also would I. Happy thought! Sup- 
 posing I dragged that pan of unwashed 
 crockery to the top of the cellar stairs, and
 
 ONE OF MY EAKLIEST ADVENTURES. 35 
 
 then pushed it clown ? That would alarm 
 Mrs. Skinner and her servant. They would 
 fly to the cellar-head to learn the meaning 
 of the terrible noise. In the confusion I 
 could dash out, make for the street, and run 
 home. 
 
 My heart beat wildly with the excitement 
 of this idea. I suddenly found my imprison- 
 ment intolerable. The sound of the factory 
 bell came faint and slow in at the cellar 
 grating. I could hear above it the sound of the 
 river falling over the weir. It maddened me 
 this music of freedom. Taking a deep breath 
 I seized the pan of crockery and dragged it 
 toward the cellar steps. At length it faltered 
 on the brink. 
 
 Before committing myself to the comple- 
 tion of my fell design I kicked at the door 
 and howled out a wild appeal for forgiveness 
 and release. No reply. The factory bell 
 and the weir went on humming pleasantly in 
 the distance, and I smelt pork chops. Mrs. 
 Skinner was engaged at her mid-day meal. 
 Purk chops was her favourite dish. I could 
 d2
 
 36 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 see her in my heated imagination, her gay 
 cap nodding over the succulent meat, while 
 her domestic-in-chief poured out the nut- 
 brown ale. 
 
 Human nature could endure no more. 
 Bang, crash, rattle, smash, bump, thump, 
 swish, scrunge, whack ! This is some- 
 thing like the impression the noise of the 
 descending pan and its contents has left in 
 my memory as they reached the bottom of 
 the cellar stairs. The door opened almost 
 on the instant as I expected. I darted forth 
 between Mrs. Skinner and her lieutenant-in- 
 petticoat s, through the kitchen, out at the 
 back door, down the passage that led to the 
 street, where I met Tommy Barnes returning 
 to school surfeited with pudding and sticky 
 with sweets. He tried to seize me. I pushed 
 him into the gutter and fled. 
 
 It was my father who received me into 
 his arms a few minutes afterwards, and when 
 Mrs. Skinner called to demand the instant 
 restoration of her pupil or his prompt punish- 
 ment at home, my father in his best decla-
 
 ONE OF MY EARLIEST ADVENTURES. 37 
 
 matoiy manner said, "Madame, I will not 
 consent to what you propose. My son is not 
 a dog to be whipped, nor a barbarian to be 
 imprisoned ; neither, Madame, does your mis- 
 taken conclusions in regard to the discipline 
 of the little ones meet with my approval. 
 You should better be employed to govern 
 savages. Adieu, Madame Skinnaire ! " 
 
 With that my father withdrew into the 
 parlour, where he bade me tell all the story 
 over again, and vowed I should be a great 
 man some day, worthy of the esprit of France 
 and the honesty of my mother's countrymen. 
 
 Whatever my lot was destined to be, the 
 dear old gentleman who first inspired me 
 with a love of travel did not live to guide or 
 review it. How I suddenly fell within the 
 governmental dominion of Mr. Jonas Welby, 
 and how unexpected succour came to me in 
 the darkest hour of my boyhood, will form 
 the subject of a few following chapters. It is 
 not my intention to dwell upon these childish 
 experiences. They may be considered pretty 
 well at an end with the incidents of this
 
 38 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 cliapter. The advent of Connie Gardner, 
 the pretty waif and stray of Searsdale, grand- 
 cliild of ^' Laudnum Nanny," is the ^^ coming 
 event" for which I claim the reader's con- 
 tinued attention. Connie flitted across my 
 path in the Scarsdale meadows, a thing of 
 beauty and of joy, to leave behind her a 
 shadowy memory, which Fate revived in 
 after-years with a cruel inspiration of love 
 and sorrow.
 
 39 
 
 CHAPER III. 
 
 *^ OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY." 
 
 In my mother's estimation I rapidly 
 justified her opinion that my father filled my 
 head with nonsense. 
 
 At the factory, where my father spent so 
 much time, there was among the ^^ hands," 
 as they were called, an old gruesome-look- 
 ing woman who was known as ^'Laudnum 
 Nanny." The nick-name was a trihute to 
 Mrs. Lingard's capacity for imbibing opium 
 in its more common English form of laudrjum. 
 When I was a boy this drug was largely 
 consumed at Scarsdale, more particularly by 
 old men and women. It often served them 
 instead of food. They preferred it to rum
 
 40 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 or brandy. Nanny Lingard must have spent 
 more money upon it than would have supplied 
 her with regular and wholesome meals of 
 food. She was a withered-looking hag. Her 
 face was as wrinkled as a nutmeg and of a 
 similar colour. Her eyes were very bright. 
 She was sometimes very agreeable and some- 
 times very savage. Her hair was as white as 
 the cotton that clung about her stiff bomba- 
 zine gown. She carried a crutch-stick, 
 though she was as nimble a-foot as the 
 youngest girl in the factory; and the youngest 
 was a child, her granddaughter. 
 
 Connie Gardner was this child. She was 
 too young to do anything like labour in the 
 factory ; but her grandmother took her there 
 on two or three days a week to help her, and 
 on the other two or three days she went to 
 school. Connie was my senior by seven years 
 She told me so one day in a long conversa- 
 tion we had about our schools and school- 
 mistresses. There was a little stream of 
 smoking water that ran into the river by the 
 factory. I was fishing there one day for
 
 OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY. 4 1 
 
 minnows and other small fish that congre- 
 gated about the luke-warm water which 
 marked its radius with a white fleecy mist, 
 when Connie stopped to watch me. Young 
 or old, how one always pauses to consider 
 and ruminate over an angler ! In the back- 
 ground of one of my friend George Bough- 
 ton's illustrations of Holland, I remember 
 that quite a community have stopped to 
 ponder over the sport of a little Dutch fellow 
 who is dangling his legs over a lock, and con- 
 templating a very ponderous ^ Afloat." A 
 man in a cart has pulled up to look at the 
 boy ; a couple of sailors have turned their 
 quids and their attention at the same time 
 to the young fisherman ; a nurse has sat 
 down on the canal bank with her charge ; 
 and the crowd has gradually grown into an 
 interested if not an anxious audience. 
 
 The people who passed over the bridge 
 that led to the Scarsdale factory were too 
 busy as a rule to hang about watching my 
 gentle attacks on the minnows and gudgeon 
 of the Nortli Midland River. Even the boys
 
 42 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 had only time to pick up a stone and try to 
 disturb my prospects. But one summer day 
 Connie Gardner without a word came and sat 
 down by my side. I had often watched her 
 with wonder, if not with admiration. There 
 was something of pity in my wonder, for it 
 was currently reported that Laudnum Nanny 
 was in the habit of beating her granddaughter. 
 It was also said that Nanny was gifted with 
 powers of witchcraft which she did not exer- 
 cise only out of her fear of the constable and 
 the justices. The very house in which the 
 old woman and her grandchild lived was 
 strange enough to encourage the belief in 
 the uncanny relations that Laudnum Nanny 
 held with the outside world of Scarsdale. 
 It was a tenement that looked as if it had 
 been packed into the corner of an old street 
 at its juncture with another old street, like 
 a wedge to hold the adjoining houses to- 
 gether. It had only one window and one 
 door, and the latter was approached by a 
 long row of stone stairs. Nothing looked 
 more grim in Scarsdale than to see the old
 
 OVER THE HILLS AND FAE AWAY. 43 
 
 woman sitting at the top of these steps 
 taking the air on summer nights after the 
 day's work was done, a candle burning 
 within the neatly-kept room, and Connie a 
 shadowy figure poring over a book by its 
 dim and somewhat mysterious light. 
 
 She was singularly beautiful this waif and 
 stray of the town where I was born. Great 
 liquid eyes of a blueish-grey ; long light hair 
 tied up in a couple of plaits that hung upon 
 her shoulders ; a dreamy expression in her 
 eyes always ; and a certain sort of sadness 
 aljout her firm mouth that both attracted 
 and repelled. You felt sorry for her with- 
 out caring to say so ; you felt that if she 
 was only a child of the gutter the fact was 
 an accident. I think I had a secret sym- 
 pathy for her because we were both martyrs 
 to circumstances. I was persecuted by the 
 youths of Scarsdale because my father was 
 of French extraction and showed it. She 
 was illused because she was an orphan and 
 had to be brought up by a laudanum- drinking 
 grandmother.
 
 44 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 I can see the little pair of sufferers now 
 sitting by the Scarsdale river, the mist of 
 the factory steam lingering about the bosom 
 of the river in strange shapes. 
 
 ^^Are you watching the fish or the 
 steam ? " she asks, in a voice more of com- 
 mand than inquiry. 
 
 '' The fish," I reply. 
 
 '^ Oh," she says. 
 
 ^^ I don't see anything in the steam," I 
 remark, my eyes still fixed upon the float. 
 
 ^^It is like fairies dancing," she says, 
 equally intent upon the mist rising from the 
 hot water as it pours from the engine-house 
 into the river. 
 
 ^' Is it ? '' I answer, looking up, '' did you 
 ever see fairies dancing ? " 
 
 ^^ No, but grandmother has and devils too.'' 
 
 '' Devils ! '' I exclaim. 
 
 '' Demons,'' she answers, ^^ it is the same 
 
 thing." 
 
 
 " Where ? " 
 
 
 " In the meadows. 
 
 77 
 
 " When ? " 

 
 OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY. 45 
 
 '* At night when we are all abed." 
 ^'Are you not afraid of your grand- 
 mother ? " 
 
 ^' Sometimes." 
 '^When?" 
 
 ^^ When she is angry." 
 ^^Oh!" 
 
 This last ejaculation proclaimed a bite of 
 more than ordinary severity, and I landed 
 what we called a bull -head or devil' s-tlmmb. 
 ^^ The horrible thing ! " I exclaimed, ^^ it's 
 one of those fish with the name of the demons. 
 What shall I do ? " 
 
 '' Take it off the hook and kill it," she 
 replied. 
 
 ^' I would not touch it for the world," I 
 said. 
 
 ^' I will," she answers, and takes it off 
 the hook. 
 
 ^' Kill it!" I exclaimed. 
 *' No, fling it back into the river ; it can't 
 help being a bull-head, or whatever it is, 
 any more than you can help being little 
 Frenchy, or I Laudnum Nanny's brat."
 
 46 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 She flun<^ it back into the stream. It 
 
 made a little whirlpool as it fell out of sight. 
 
 '' Look at the steam, how it dances round 
 
 like water fairies in a ring," she exclaimed. 
 
 * ' I'll fairies in a ring you ! " said a harsh 
 grating voice that reminded me of the saw- 
 grinders who worked now and then outside 
 the carpenter's shop at Scarsdale, '' wasting 
 your time ! I'll teach you to keep me wait- 
 ing when I've sent you on a particular 
 errand.'' 
 
 A stroke across Connie's shoulders, with a 
 stick announced to her and to me that sen- 
 tence and punishment were almost simul- 
 taneous in their action. 
 
 " You horrid old woman ! " I shouted, 
 ^* how dare you ! '' 
 
 ''Dare! you little savage, I'll give it to 
 you if you call me names." 
 
 I picked up the can prepared for carrying 
 home my fish, and threatened her in dumb 
 show. 
 
 The stick fell smartly on my shoulders 
 as it had on Connie's, and the next moment
 
 OVER THE HILLS xVND FAR AWAY. 47 
 
 tliG can, water and all, struck the cruel liag 
 full in the face, and I fled for dear life. 
 
 When Dame Skinner heard of this brutal 
 assault by Durand's wicked urchin, she 
 called a solemn '^ silence" in her school, and 
 told her trembling classes of the awful crime 
 I had committed. My mother, too, I am 
 bound to say, was greatly shocked. She 
 saw in my desperate conduct an unnatural 
 wilfulness. '' You will come to a bad end," 
 she said, '' if you do not control your pas- 
 sionate nature." 
 
 It was no defence in my poor mother's 
 eyes that I had been a witness of Laudnum 
 Nanny's cruelty to her granddaughter, nor 
 was it justifiable that I should be very nearly 
 committing a murder simply because an old 
 woman had struck me with her cane. It 
 appeared that I had inflicted a slight wound 
 on the old woman's cheek, which Mr Welby 
 said was hardly in keeping with the cha- 
 racter for chivalry of the country to which 
 I belonged. Mr. Welby had no right to 
 refer to France as my country, but he did so
 
 48 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 continually in my father's absence. In this 
 way 1 knew in later years that he helped to 
 cut me off from the affection of my mother. 
 She, poor soul, in her vanity and pride, no 
 doubt suffered as I did from local prejudice. 
 Her family and friends always blamed her 
 for marrying my father, because he was not 
 only much older than herself, but for the 
 reason that he was the son of a Frenchman. 
 Scarsdale gradually made this a sort of social 
 grievance against both my father and my 
 mother, and Mr. Welby encouraged it for 
 his own ends. My father's very accomplish- 
 ments were made a cause of derision. It was 
 unmanly to play the violoncello ; it was 
 finikin to wear a high collar and dress coat 
 and have frills to your shirt-front; it was 
 idle to sit for hours scraping at a fiddle. 
 
 Ah, me ! how well I remember with what 
 silent rapture I would sit and listen to my 
 father as he poured his very soul into his 
 instrument. He evidently set his thoughts 
 to music I was not sufficiently expert in 
 those days to know what works he most often
 
 OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY. 49 
 
 played. I think he sat or dreamed of his 
 boyhood and made accompaniments to his 
 recollections of France. Sometimes his 
 music would set me thinking of Ulysses and 
 his many adventures, and of his son left 
 at home to the mercy of his enemies. Now 
 and then I seemed to see the face of 
 Connie Gardner looking at me through a 
 musical fancy, and just as suddenly her cruel 
 grandmother would dispel the vision with a 
 stick. 
 
 All this is so much like a dream to-day 
 that I find myself unable to set it down, 
 except in this disjointed and unsystematic 
 fashion. Connie's personality somehow is 
 mixed up in my memory with everything 
 that comes back to me, belonging to those 
 strange days of my childhood. She apj^ears 
 to me with the imaginary sounds of the music 
 of my early home, and I see her face, not 
 only in the placid river that still runs through 
 the Scarsdale country, but it takes shape in 
 my memory of the flashing wheels and shafts 
 of the factory. And yet in later years we 
 
 VOL. I. E
 
 50 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 met, and I no longer knew her. The tender, 
 though defiant eyes, that had a fascination for 
 me when I was a boy in checked hose and 
 buckled shoes, held me once more when I was 
 a man, only the Scarsdale waif and stray 
 remained locked away in the storehouse of 
 my memory. It has a companion remi- 
 niscence in these later days that is also drift- 
 ing away into the half-forgotten region of 
 life's regrets and dreams. 
 
 The last time that I saw Constance Gard- 
 ner (until she was a woman, in whom I failed 
 to identify the girl of my boyish dreams) was 
 under painful, yet romantic, circumstances. 
 I recall the incident now with all its sur- 
 roundings and attendant details, though it 
 presents itself to my mind more like an 
 episode of another person's life than as 
 having anything in common with my own. 
 
 It is summer, bright genial summer. I 
 do not think there have ever been such sum- 
 mers in England as there were in the Valley 
 of Scarsdale when I was a boy. But let me 
 not pause to cast reflections upon the climate
 
 OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY. 51 
 
 and otiier disagreeable characteristics of 
 these modern days. It is summer, I say, 
 in that sylvan country of my youth. A 
 lonely child by force of circumstances, not 
 because my disposition is morose, I have 
 been wandering towards the summit of those 
 hills that always seemed further and further 
 away the longer I walked towards them, 
 although there were times when they almost 
 mirrored their loftiest peaks in the river that 
 flowed under my bedroom window. 
 
 I am retiring homewards late in tha 
 afternoon, walking along a dusty highway, 
 my hands full of wild roses. Around a bend 
 of the road comes a yellow house on wheels 
 drawn by two horses. I notice that the 
 doors of the travelling cottage are partially 
 open, and that a buxom woman is leaning 
 over a sort of splash-board and lazily sub- 
 mitting herself to the drowsy influence of 
 the heat of the day and the perfumes of the 
 meadows. A second house on wheels fol- 
 lows ; then a waggon heaped high with tent- 
 poles and baggage ; next a cart similarly 
 e2 
 
 LIBRARY 
 UNIVERSITY OF lUl
 
 52 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 weighted ; and finally a decorated car con- 
 taining half - a - dozen men and women. 
 ^' Richards's Theatre Royal " is emblazoned 
 in gold and blue on this last carriage. It is 
 a procession of the best known strolling 
 players of the time, and it moves along like 
 a pageant in a panorama. I pause to watch 
 the cavalcade as it passes by me. One of 
 the drivers stops to pluck from the hedge- 
 row some bunches of hay, which have been 
 left on tree and bramble by the waggons 
 that have been carrjdng the grass-harvest 
 to an adjacent farm. He gives the dainty 
 morsels to his horses, and they go munching 
 and plodding on until they disappear round 
 the next bend of the road, and I wonder 
 whether they will go right over the top of 
 the distant hills and down into the country 
 beyond, where the palace is that is more 
 wonderful than anything Ulysses saw in all 
 his travels. 
 
 While I am tracing in my infantile mind 
 the course of the show-people's route, I am 
 conscious of some one passing me as if de-
 
 OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY. 53 
 
 sirous of doinof so unobserved. It is a 
 shadow that first attracts my attention, a 
 shadow of short petticoats and long legs ; a 
 shadow with a bundle in one hand and a hat 
 in the other; a shadow with a head that 
 bends as if to seek the shelter of the hedge 
 on the opposite side of the road ; a shadow 
 that was destined once again to fall across 
 my thoughts and disturb my dreams. 
 
 ^' It is Connie ! " I exclaim, as the figure 
 goes by following the shadow. 
 
 Neither one nor the other halt as I speak. 
 They hurry on towards the cloud of dust 
 that follows the show-people's caravan. 
 
 '' Connie I Connie ! " I call. 
 
 There is no reply. I am very tired, but I 
 forget it and follow her quickly. 
 
 ^^What is the matter, Connie?" I ask, 
 when I overtake her. 
 
 ^'Nothing,'' she answers, turning -towards 
 me a face that is white in spite of the heat. 
 
 '^Nothing?" I repeat, interrogating. 
 
 "Nothing," she says; '^ why do you 
 ask?"
 
 54 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 ''1 don't know." 
 
 *' Very well, then, don't interrupt me." 
 
 ^' Do I interrupt you ?" 
 
 "Yes, you do." 
 
 " Oh," I say, for the want of any other 
 reply. 
 
 " What are you following me for ?" 
 
 " I only thought I would like to speak to 
 you." 
 
 "Then you had better not; because I 
 am a bad, wicked girl." 
 
 "No you are not, Connie," I answer, 
 promptly. 
 
 "I am, and you must not tell any one 
 you have seen me." 
 
 " I will not if you don't wish me to," I 
 answer. 
 
 " You had better not go home along this 
 road ; go over the fields." 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 " You will perhaps meet my grand- 
 mother, and she will kill you." 
 
 " Oh no she won't, I'm not afraid of 
 her," I reply.
 
 OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY. 55 
 
 '^ I am," says Connie, adding almost in a 
 whisper, '* I hate her !" 
 
 ^' Has she been beating you?" 
 
 The girl lays down her bundle by the 
 road-side, and, withdrawing one of her arms 
 from the little sleeve of her frock, shows me 
 her shoulder, all bruised. 
 
 '^ Poor Connie !" I say, as she slips her 
 arm once more into her sleeve, ^' I wish I 
 were a man, I would beat her." 
 
 " She will never beat me again," says 
 the girl, ^^ so it does not matter this 
 once." 
 
 ^' What are you going to do ?" 
 
 ^^ I am not going to do anything — I am 
 doing it." 
 
 ^^What?" 
 
 ^^ You like me ?" she says. 
 
 ^' Very much, Connie." 
 
 '^ And I like you. Will you promise not 
 to say you have seen me to-day, and I will 
 tell you what I am doing ?" 
 
 ^^Yes" 
 
 ^' I am running away ! "
 
 56 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 ^^ Are you?" 
 
 ^^ Over the hills?" 
 
 ^^ Over the hills and far away,'' she 
 answers with a smile that nearly makes me 
 cry, there is so little of mirth in it. 
 
 '' Let me go with you." 
 
 '' No, no, you have a happy home." 
 
 ''Have I?" 
 
 '^ Yes, you know you have, and you are 
 not old enough to leave it." 
 
 '^ How old are you ?" 
 
 '' Sixteen." 
 
 '^ I am nine," I say, ''but I am nearly 
 as tall as you." 
 
 " But not so lonely and wretched," she 
 says, and with that she bursts into tears and 
 flings herself on the strip of grass that margins 
 the road-side, where a hoppled pony is crop- 
 ping the herbage, pausing now and then as 
 if to look at us. 
 
 I kneel down by Connie's side, but I say 
 nothing. One of her arms is stretched out 
 along tlie grass. I stroke it tenderly. Pre-
 
 OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY. 57 
 
 sently her hand seeks mine, and her fingers 
 close over it convulsively. 
 
 To-day I look back and see that pathetic 
 road-side picture of childish despair, and I 
 hear the evening song of the thrush that 
 sang as joyously all the time as if the world 
 teemed with happiness and love. 
 
 " Good-bye, Horace Durand," says the 
 girl, rising to her feet and wiping her 
 eyes. 
 
 ^^No, no I"' I say, ''come home with 
 me and I will ask my father to let you live 
 with us." 
 
 '' Grood-bye!" is all she says, but she puts 
 her arms round me and kisses me. 
 
 Then my own eyes are filled with tears 
 and I eling to her. 
 
 "Don't leave me, Connie!" I say, "I 
 am lonely too." 
 
 '' Good-bye," she says, '' you have given 
 me your promise not to tell. Good-bye, my 
 dear, dear friend ! " 
 
 The next thing that I remember, until I 
 reached home, was that I was alone on the
 
 58 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 dusty highway with a handful of crushed 
 roses, which to-day typify to me the sorrows 
 and troubles of that sunny summer when 
 Constance Gardner ran away.
 
 59 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 FUNERAL CHIMES AND MARRIAGE BELLS. 
 
 Night had fallen upon hill and dale, upon 
 dusty road and running brook, before I 
 reached home. Lights were twinkling here 
 and there in cottage windows, and it ap- 
 peared as if Oakfield House had specially 
 illuminated itself. It was lighted up, spare 
 bedrooms and all. 
 
 Mr. Jonas Welby met me at the door. 
 He was standing on the threshold with his 
 hands in his pockets, more than ever it 
 seemed to me master of the situation. 
 
 ^^ The return of Ulysses," he said, as I 
 walked in front of him ; ^^ and have you 
 beheld the Pleiads, the Bear, and the Wag- 
 goner ?
 
 GO A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 I did not rejDly, but attempted to push 
 past my obstructor. 
 
 ^^ Not so fast, my friend," said Mr. 
 Welby, 'Sve hav^e been hunting for you 
 everywhere, and your absence demands an 
 explanation." 
 
 ^^I will tell my father where I have 
 been," I said. 
 
 '^ I fear not; an hour ago you might have 
 done so ; at the present moment the doctors 
 say he is not to be disturbed on any ac- 
 count." 
 
 '' The doctors ! " I exclaimed, in alarm, 
 dropping my poor faded and crushed flowers 
 at the feet of my tormentor. 
 
 '' The doctors ! " he said, ^' your father is 
 dangerously ill. I am here to tell you so, 
 and to prevent you from exciting him by your 
 presence. He has asked for you many 
 times, but not lately ; he is insensible." 
 
 ''Oh! Mr. Welby, let me see him ! " I 
 said, as I leaned against the door-post, half 
 fainting with terror and weariness. 
 
 ''No, Sir! Already you have frightened
 
 FUNEKAL CHIMES AND MARRIAGE BELLS. 61 
 
 your mother almost out of her wits with 
 visions of your being brought home on a 
 shutter, or notified as drowned. If you were 
 my son, Horace Durand, I would teach you 
 something different." 
 
 " I am not your son," I said, pulling my 
 self together for a moment, but only to burst 
 into tears the next. 
 
 '^ That's true ; it is a good thing for both 
 of us," he said. 
 
 ^^ Oh, Mr. Welby, why do you hate me 
 so ? " I exclaimed ; ^^ I have done nothing to 
 make you ! But let me go into the house, 
 pray do ! Let me see my father ! " 
 
 ^' The doctors forbid it ; they say it might 
 be his death," he answered, thrusting him- 
 self in my way. 
 
 *' My mother, then," I said. 
 
 ^^ She is at your father's bed-side." 
 
 *' And he has asked for me ?" 
 
 " Over and over again," said my tor- 
 mentor, calmly. 
 
 " Then I will see him," I exclaimed, sud- 
 denly dashing past him, he after me, and
 
 62 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 presently arresting my progress with his 
 strong hand twisted into my collar. 
 
 ^^You young scoundrel!" he said, in a 
 hoarse whisper, ^^I will shake the life out 
 of you if you attempt to go anywhere but 
 yonder into the kitchen.'* 
 
 He thrust me forward into the room where 
 Carky Jones was sitting crying by the fire. 
 
 '' You beast ! " I exclaimed, quivering 
 with rage and indignation, as I confronted 
 the closed door. 
 
 '' Come here, Horace," said Jones, '^ don't 
 be a bad, wicked boy." 
 
 '' I am not." 
 
 '^ Yes, you are ; come here." 
 
 '' What is the matter ? " I asked. 
 
 '^ Your father has had an accident with 
 one o'them new constrapshuns of his at the 
 factory ; doctors say its eternal, and has hurt 
 his heart," said the girl, '' and the grey- 
 hounds at the Angel Inn have bin liowlin 
 and goin on all the afternoon, just as they 
 did when Lawyer Tibbins died."
 
 FUNERAL CHIMES AND MARRIAGE BELLS. 63 
 
 At ten minutes to five the next morning 
 my father died. He was conscious and he 
 looked happy. I kissed him at his request, 
 and he passed away with his hand in mine. 
 My mother sat weeping by the bedside. 
 The doctors were in the dining-room down 
 stairs. I did not know that the dear kind 
 old gentleman was dead until they came 
 up and said so. One of them led me into 
 an adjoining room, patting my head in 
 a kindly way. The morning sun was 
 streaming in at the window, the birds were 
 singing, and I could hear the music of the 
 river just as if nothing had happened. But it 
 was quite true that my father was dead ; and 
 so strongly had the stories he loved to tell 
 me taken possession of my mind, that, in a 
 vague sort of way, I felt as if he were Ulysses 
 and I indeed his son Telemaclms. I look 
 back now and feel that this was only the 
 tribute of a naturally affectionate nature to a 
 doting father, who loved me so much that he 
 was anxious to introduce me into that dream- 
 world he knew so well. He might have pre-
 
 64 A MODEEN ULYSSES. 
 
 f erred to lead my mother into those romantic 
 and poetic paths which he traversed in imagi- 
 nation accompanied by tlie music of his 
 cello, but she was no apt pupil in that 
 direction. I was, and he loved me with all 
 his tender and gentle yet passionate nature. 
 He died a martyr to science. Many a 
 family has lived and prospered and many a 
 township has grown rich through the me- 
 chanical revelations which he left behind 
 him. I love France for his sake, and the 
 paths he trod as a boy are dear to me for all 
 
 time. 
 
 * * * * 
 
 The ^'art of skipping" is, I am told, culti- 
 vated more persistently by the novel-reader 
 than by the critic. I propose to move along 
 at this period of my story in sympathy with 
 both. I am going to ^' skip," as nimbly as 
 consistency of narrative will permit, the 
 years that at this point separate the boy 
 from the man. 
 
 The disappearance of Constance Gardner 
 may be regarded as the denouement of the
 
 FUNERAL CHIMES AND MxVERIAGE BELLS. 65 
 
 first decade of my life. Not that the in- 
 cident assumed this importance at the time. 
 It was overshadowed by the death of my 
 father and the marriage (within a year of his 
 decease) of his widow to Mr. Welby. When 
 I first read '' Hamlet " the idea of the funeral 
 baked meats coldly furnishing forth the mar- 
 riage feast revived in my mind sad and pain- 
 ful memories. Not that there was anything 
 indecorous in the re-entry of my mother into 
 the married state, either as to the time or 
 tlie manner of it. The dear old Frenchman 
 who believed in the English heart was buried 
 with great state. He was mourned not 
 exactly in sack-cloth and ashes, but in the 
 most ample form of crape and merino. The 
 bells of the old church of Scarsdale marked 
 the slow gait of the funeral procession with 
 muffled peals. Along the route the shops 
 were closed, and the blinds were drawn down 
 ^t all the private houses ; for it was remem- 
 bered that the Anglo-French designer and 
 inventor had materially improved the trade 
 of the town. 
 
 VOL. I. F
 
 66 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 Strange to say, in many after years, 
 when I projected my memory back into the 
 past, I saw, in the pictures it conjured up, the 
 face of Connie Gardner. I regard this as 
 strange, because she had no associations with 
 the inner life of Oakfield House. Her life 
 was a thing apart from mine. I only saw 
 her outside my home. She was not exactly 
 an acquaintance who was forbidden me. It 
 had, I suspect, never occurred to my father 
 or mother that I should be likely to know 
 Connie Gardner, except as a young per- 
 son not to know. Yet she had mixed 
 herself up in my tenderest recollections. I 
 saw her tearful face, and heard her voice in 
 all my pictures of home, and in the music 
 of the later years when Scarsdale was only a 
 memory. The day came when I learnt that 
 the chord which her sorrowful words had 
 touched in my heart was love, though the 
 revelation was untowardly brought about. 
 
 At the funeral of my father I made the ac- 
 quaintance of my great-uncle, the brother of 
 my mother's father, a straight-backed, formal,
 
 FUNERAL CHIMES AND MARRIAGE BELLS. 67 
 
 upright, honourable, but somewhat eccentric, 
 English gentleman. He was known in the 
 Worcestershire Valley, where he lived, as 
 honest Dick Grantley. He w^as a Justice of 
 tlie Peace, and had a pretty little estate. 
 As proud as the most aristocratic man 
 in the county, he was still called Dick 
 Grantley. He walked by my side in the 
 funeral procession, took my hand in church, 
 patted it furtively when I cried, and when 
 all was over took me for a long walk in the 
 fields beyond Oakfield House, and said little 
 or nothing all the way there and back. He 
 was a tall athletic, white-headed gentleman, 
 w^ith a florid complexion and a large bony 
 hand. When we came home in the after- 
 noon he patted my mother's hand, just as he 
 had patted mine, and kissed me on the fore- 
 head. My mother looked very sweet and 
 young, and pretty, in her black gown. Uncle 
 Grantley said so. I heard him. He said 
 something about girls marrying old men, and 
 I think it was in disparagement of such 
 unions. My mother said my father had 
 f2
 
 68 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 always been kind and considerate, and that he 
 had denied her nothing. Mr. Welby came in, 
 while we were all sitting together round the 
 first fire of the autumn season, and asked my 
 uncle to make an appointment on the next 
 day to go into ^^ the deceased's affairs." I 
 remember his very words. I forget very 
 little connected with Mr. Welby, and I re- 
 member nothing that does not even now jar 
 on my sensibilities. 
 
 I think my uncle saw that I had a child- 
 ish antipathy for my mother's trustee (my 
 father had left him with my mother full power 
 over his property whatever and wherever it 
 might be), for on the next day he said — 
 
 '' You don't like your mother's trustee, 
 Mr. Welby?" 
 
 ^^ No, Sir." 
 
 '' Why do you not like him ? " 
 
 '' He has a loud voice, and says I am a 
 chip of the old block." 
 
 ^^Oh, indeed!" said my uncle, '^ is that 
 all?" 
 
 '^ I think so."
 
 FUNERAL CHIMES AND MARRIAGE BELLS. 69 
 
 ^^ Do you like me?" 
 
 "Yes, Sir." 
 
 "Very much?" 
 
 "Not as much as father!" I answered, 
 the tears in my eyes, almost for the first time 
 since the dear gentleman's death, for I had 
 only just realised the solemn fact that Oak- 
 field House knew him no more. 
 
 " No, no, of course not, but for an uncle 
 I am not so bad ; for an uncle, eh ? Not the 
 sort of uncle that took the children into the 
 wood and left them there, eh ? " 
 
 "No, Sir." 
 
 " Look at me, Horace !" he went on, taking 
 me between his knees, "I am an old fellow, 
 and I have no children. If ever you should 
 be unhappy here, and your mother is willing 
 for you to come and live with me, and let me 
 be your father, I will give you a home, and 
 make a gentleman of you. Do you hear what 
 I say ? " 
 
 " Yes, Sir ; I thank you." 
 
 " Will you remember it ?" 
 
 "Yes, Sir."
 
 70 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 " Is that all you have to say?" 
 
 I laid my hand in his and looked up into 
 his genial ruddy face. 
 
 '' What are you thinking about, little 
 one?" 
 
 ^^Is your home over the hills yonder?" 
 I asked. 
 
 '^ Yes, miles away." 
 
 '^Near the Palace?" 
 
 '' What Palace ?" he asked. 
 
 '' The one that is grander than anything 
 Ulysses saw?" 
 
 '' Well, no," he answered ; '^ but we have 
 several palaces in Worcestershire that will 
 answer as well, I dare say." 
 
 '^ But I must stay at home and take care 
 of my mother as the son of Ulysses did,'' 
 I said, my little mind wandering back to the 
 incident in which my father had challenged 
 my affection and courage in the presence of 
 Mr. Welby. 
 
 ^^ You know all about Ulysses, then ?" 
 
 ^^Yes, Sir; my father used to read the 
 great book to me, and tell me of his adven- 
 tures."
 
 FUNERAL CHIMES AND MARRIAGE BELLS. 71 
 
 ^^ Ahj well, there is not the same reason 
 for you to remain at home as there was in the 
 ease of that other young man in the classics ; 
 but stay and take care of your mother, 
 Horace, as long as you like, and when 
 she can spare you come to the Cedars at 
 Breedon." 
 
 '' Yes, Sir;' 
 
 ^' I have arranged with your mother that 
 you shall write to me a letter every week ; 
 you can write, of course?" 
 
 " Not a letter." 
 
 My uncle rang the bell in the hotel 
 parlour where this interview took place. 
 
 ^' Pens, ink, and paper," he said. 
 
 These materials being brought, he said, 
 '' Now, little one, write down my name and 
 address." 
 
 I took up a pen, blushed, dipped it in the 
 ink, blacked my fingers by seizing the pen- 
 holder too low down, and proceeded to write 
 in a big round-hand, ''^ Uncle Grantley." 
 
 '^ Very good," he said, looking over my 
 shoulder. ^^ Now write Richard Grantley,
 
 72 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 Esquire, J. P. The Cedars, Breedon, Worces- 
 tershire." 
 
 With a little assistance I accomplished 
 the feat. 
 
 ^^ Very well. Here is a guinea to pay 
 for postage- stamps, and now we may say 
 good-bye ; here comes the coach." 
 
 He rang the bell again. 
 . '^ Send the young person here, Mrs. 
 Durand's servant?" 
 
 Carky Jones responded to the. summons. 
 
 ^^ Take my nephew home and be good to 
 him," said the Worcestershire J.P. 
 
 ^^ Yes, Sir," she said, curtseying with 
 remarkable humility for Jones. 
 
 ^^ Very good," he said, slipping a guinea 
 into her hand. 
 
 She looked at the money, curtseyed even 
 more deferentially than before, and in a few 
 minutes afterwards I stood, my hand in hers, 
 watching the coach depart in the direction 
 of the hills that shut Scarsdale from the 
 world. The '^ Royal Mail '' coach was the 
 last on the road. It ran between the little
 
 FUNERAL CHIMES AND MARRIAGE BELLS. 78 
 
 Derbyshire borough and the nearest railway 
 station a dozen miles away. Many years 
 previously it had been a famous coach on 
 the highway that linked Scarsdale with 
 the Great City. 
 
 My uncle had no doubt sufficient pre- 
 science to forecast the future of my mother 
 and Oakfield House, and he saw evidently 
 the possibility uf the time arriving when my 
 mother's love might be weaned from her first- 
 born. Within twelve months the muffled 
 chime that made doleful music at my father's 
 funeral was succeeded by a wedding peal, 
 rung out joyously on the same bells. The 
 parson who had met that funeral procession 
 in which I walked hand-in-hand with uncle 
 Grantley joined the hands of the widow and 
 Mr. Welby. A bevy of bridesmaids flung 
 flowers at the feet of the bride. The factory 
 hands had a holiday, and a great dinner was 
 spread for them under a tent at the King's 
 Head. Mr. and Mrs. Welby went away in 
 a carriage and four horses, and Carky Jones 
 insisted on my going to bed unusually early
 
 74 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 that night. I remember that T sat on the 
 edge of my little bedstead (while the sun 
 was setting behind the hills) looking out 
 along the roadway that went up to the very . 
 top of the highest of them, and that there 
 was a vague but bitter sense of wrong in 
 my heart. Before my mother left she had 
 taken me up into her arms and wept over me, 
 and my step-father had somewhat roughly 
 dragged me away from her. 
 
 '' Horace," he said, '' you must not make 
 your mother cry." 
 
 '' I don't wish to do so," I answered. 
 
 ^' There, don't argue, my lad! " he replied, 
 '^ good bye!" 
 
 He took my hand, but without pressure 
 on either side. 
 
 '^ I said good bye," he remarked. 
 
 *^ Say good bye, dear," said my mother, 
 with a look of frightened appeal in her 
 beautiful eyes. 
 
 ''Good bye, Sir!" I said. 
 
 As he hurried my mother away, he 
 turned to say to me in a whisper that came
 
 FUNERAL CHIMES AND MARRIAGE BELLS. 75 
 
 through his white teeth with a hissing sound, 
 '^ We will alter this stubborn nature of yours 
 one of these days, Master Horace Durand 
 
 Ulysses!"
 
 76 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 IN WHICH MY UNCLE SAYS I AM A LUCKY DOG. 
 
 ^ The time soon came when Mr. Welby 
 put his hatred of me into practice. His 
 persecution was all the more galling that 
 he succeeded in making my mother believe 
 that I really was the young termagant he 
 continually declared me to be. Mr. Welby 
 was one of those humbugs who proclaim 
 their honesty and sense of justice, one of 
 those irrepressible individuals who pose 
 before the world as frank, outspoken, and 
 honourable on the strength of a loud voice 
 and a generally brusque and noisy man- 
 ner ; one of those ill-mannered men who 
 mistake rudeness for wit, and practise it at
 
 MY UNCLE SAYS I AM A LUCKY DOG. 77 
 
 the expense of other people. Mr. Wei by 
 fired all his spare witticisms at me. He 
 was fond of telling people of my childish 
 escapades, to which he invariably added 
 imaginary incidents with a view of making 
 me appear ridiculous. He still lives, a 
 vulgar, ostentatious parvenu. Member of 
 Parliament for the Northern Division of 
 the county in which I was born, a self- 
 made man, a Radical among the Radicals, 
 hitherto an unsuccessful candidate for office, 
 but a thorn in the side of Liberal Premiers, 
 not by reason of his personal or political 
 power, but by dint of his strength of jaw 
 and his capacity for asking questions and 
 inventing hostile motions. It is known that 
 he has his price, which is office, but as yet 
 every Minister has had sufficient respect for 
 himself and his party to refuse the comfort 
 of Mr. Welby's silence on the conditions 
 named. 
 
 It is not necessary that I should dwell 
 upon the troubles of my life, in these early 
 days of the second decade of my existence.
 
 78 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 The reader will hardly need to be told that 
 I soon obtained leave to accept my uncle's 
 invitation to go and stay at Breedon. I never 
 returned to Scarsdale. 
 
 My uncle was a bachelor. He devoted 
 his spare hours to my education. In this he 
 was assisted by the local parson, a pleasant 
 wine-drinking learned divine. I had, to 
 begin with, a fair knowledge of French, and 
 I picked up Latin with a rapidity that 
 astonished my tutors. It was often debated 
 whether I should be sent to college. The 
 question was generally left to me. I always 
 decided it in the negative. I preferred to stay 
 with my dear old uncle. He was delighted 
 at the response. So was I that my views 
 were accepted. I learnt to ride, and shoot, 
 and swim. Nobody ever called me Frenchy. 
 I grew up a sprightly and happy youth. My 
 mother wrote to me occasionally from Bramp- 
 ton Hall. Oakfield House was given over to 
 Mr. Welby's manager. The partner in the 
 firm of Scarsdale milLowners eventually 
 became sole proprietor. He was glad to
 
 MY UNCLE SAYS I AM A LUCKY DOG. 79 
 
 wipe his hands of me. My mother had be- 
 come quite illustrious for her charities ; he 
 eminent as a politician. I have a theory 
 that as a rule women who give up their lives 
 to doctoring the aged, visiting the sick, and 
 interesting themselves in nothing but poverty, 
 are seeking a diversion from the pangs of a 
 rooted sorrow. There are notable and beau- 
 tiful exceptions ; but truly tliis is the general 
 rule. My mother could not have been 
 hapjDy with Welby after her experience of 
 the gentle artistic life of Oakfield House. 
 She had wealth and ^'position," such as it 
 was, at Brampton Hall ; but she had denied 
 herself the love and companionship of her 
 son, and she was more or less snubbed by 
 the great county ladies, who regarded Mr. 
 Welby as a parvenu, trying to buy his way 
 into high society. My mother found relief 
 in notable and enduring works of charity. 
 
 During the ten years I lived at Breedon 
 Col. Tom Ernstone, an old friend of my 
 uncle, took me to France and Germany, 
 and once to Algiers. My attachment to the
 
 80 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 classic lore which my father had opened up 
 to me, my early travels and my love of 
 adventure, gained for me the sobriquet of 
 young Ulysses. Since those days I have 
 been referred to in newspaper reports and 
 at public dinners as ^^a modern Ulysses/' a 
 title which I venture to use for these random 
 reminiscences, not that I desire to challenge 
 comparison either with the original hero or 
 with the travels of General Grant, the famous 
 American President. I have seen the world, 
 and when I am an old man I may justify the 
 compliments of my friends ; for I shall be a 
 traveller all my life, I think, unless an event 
 which my uncle set his mind upon, long 
 before I was twenty, should form the post- 
 script to this present narrative. 
 
 At a little over twenty years of age I 
 was what some people call a '' young county 
 swell " who patronised local literature with 
 a dilettante pen. One day, to my great 
 surprise, I was applied to in a charming
 
 MY UNCLE SAYS I AM A LUCKY DOG. 81 
 
 feminine hand for a contribution to a new 
 magazine, to be called The May fair Magazine, 
 An editorial suggestion that a page of real 
 county life or country sport, from a gentle- 
 man's point of view, would be most accept- 
 able. If you should happen to be in a library 
 where there is a file of the publication in 
 question, turn to the first number, and you 
 will find an article entitled '^ The Feast of 
 St. Partridge : How it was celebrated by Mr. 
 Horatio Fitzhoward." That is a true sketch, 
 only the names of some of the persons being 
 fictitious. In recalling it, I remember how I 
 read the manuscript to Helen Dunstan, my 
 genial host's daughter, and how she wished 
 I had not thought it necessary to speak of 
 her father as a lord. ^^ For," said she, in her 
 democratic way, ^^ I am sure his wines would 
 have tasted as well to the reader, and his 
 meadows would have smelt as sweet, had 
 you let him be the plain English commoner 
 he is." It was no use explaining to her that 
 the fashionable constituency to be attracted by 
 The Mayfair Magazine would expect its 
 
 VOL. I. G
 
 82 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 writers to be continually hob-nobbing with 
 lords, and that, after all, my paper was 
 history; she stood up for the dignity 
 of commoners, though she was only a 
 gijcl 
 
 My companions in arms, as I think I 
 stated in my first literary e:ffort outside the 
 Breedon County Times, were Stephen Miller, 
 then a Queen's Counsel, now a Judge; young 
 Paul Ferris, a rich county fellow about my 
 own age, whose father had left him a large 
 property; Sir Christopher Hallam, a young 
 Yorkshire baronet; George Harmer, a decor- 
 ative artist engaged upon some work at the 
 manor-house, and who had made himself so 
 agreeable to Mr. Dunstan that our host had 
 invited him to share in the general hospi- 
 talities of the place; the Rev. Martin Masters, 
 the vicar of Breedon, sometime my Latin 
 tutor; and Col. Tom Ernstone, an Indian 
 officer, who, though somewhat cynical, was 
 the life and soul of the party. He was full 
 of interesting anecdote, though except on 
 rare occasions he related to us no incidents of
 
 MY UNCLE SAYS I AM A LUCKY DOG. 83 
 
 his fighting days in India. He gave us illustra- 
 tions of the courage of other men, never any 
 examples of his own. He had his tiger story 
 of course, but he was not the hero of it ; he 
 had assisted at the relief of Lucknow, but 
 his reminiscences were chiefly of Havelock 
 and Campbell. The Colonel and the Queen's 
 Counsel, Miller, evidently did not love each 
 other. They were too well bred to show this 
 except during quiet passages of repartee, in 
 which the Q. C. scored in point of wit. Mr. 
 Miller had a habit of making you feel that 
 he considered himself everybody's superior, 
 except in the case of ^^ starchy Dick Grant- 
 ley." He was always amiable towards his 
 '' old friend," as he invariably called my 
 uncle when speaking of him. Miller was a 
 remarkable man in appearance and manner. 
 His face was like the close-shaven, clean-cut, 
 aristocratic faces you see in the old pictures 
 of a by-gone aristocracy, with lips perhaps 
 a trifle too thin for a generous character and 
 a jaw of more than usual force of line. He 
 had a somewhat arrogant manner, as will be 
 g2
 
 84 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 best illustrated by a remark which Colonel 
 Ernstone made to him in response to the 
 emphatic expression of an opinion with 
 which he disagreed. 
 
 ^^ Thank Heaven we are not the defendants 
 in a great suit which you are trying from 
 the Bench," said Ernstone. 
 
 '' The verdict would certainly go against 
 you if the jury acted on my summing-up/' 
 responded Miller. 
 
 *^And if it were a hanging matter?" 
 continued Ernstone, until he was inter- 
 rupted. 
 
 ^^You would by this time have been 
 sentenced," said the Q. C. with a laugh that 
 was hard and uncongenial. 
 
 Poor Harmer! We little thought that, 
 in the days to come, he was destined to esta- 
 blish Miller's sense of justice in that higher 
 sphere which the Q. C. was yet to occupy. 
 The decorative artist had very pleasant 
 traits. He was singularly modest, almost 
 humble. His one ambition was to save 
 enough money to complete a course of
 
 MY UNCLE SAYS I AM A LUCKY DOG. 85 
 
 study at Amsterdam. His heau ideal of 
 art was that of Holland. He had begun his 
 career in a small way at the Hague and 
 appeared to love the Dutch country more 
 than his own. 
 
 "" No," he said, in response to some en- 
 couraging observations of mine about his 
 future, '^ I never hope to be more than a 
 decorative painter ; I would like to do more, 
 and yet after all there is plenty of room 
 for ambition in what is called decorative 
 art." 
 
 I' took a fancy to this young fellow 
 Haraier. It w^as decreed that I should meet 
 him again under very singular circumstances ; 
 and he was doomed to trials and disasters far 
 more serious than those which had been writ- 
 ten down for my probationary exercise this 
 side ^4he world to come;" though Ulysses 
 himself hardly had a narrower escape from a 
 hideous death than was prepared for me by 
 savages hardly less revolting than the man- 
 eaters of the classic romance. 
 
 I have recently re-read my little sketch,
 
 86 A MODEBN ULYSSES. 
 
 entitled '' The Feast of St. Partridge." It 
 is to me another slide in the dream-like 
 kaleidoscope of the past which you and I, 
 dear friendly reader, have been turning 
 round together. The feeling which it excites 
 in my mind is similar to that which is aroused 
 by the perusal of some notes written for Mrs. 
 Gatty and Aunt Judy years ago, portions of 
 which I have reproduced in illustration of the 
 system of '' Dames' Schools '' in the years that 
 are gone. I feel as if I were reading about 
 some one else, not myself; and it is this 
 sense of self-effacement which I hope will 
 enable me to set down in these pages events 
 and opinions that, related by me under other 
 circumstances, might appear arrogant and 
 self-sufficient. 
 
 Since that merry shooting party chro- 
 nicled in The May fair Magazine^ as previ- 
 ously mentioned, Stephen Miller has not 
 only become a judge, but he has tried 
 George Harmer for felony, without the 
 prisoner remembering the judge, or the 
 judge the prisoner. Harmer at this moment,
 
 MY UNCLE SAYS I AM A LUCKY DOG. 87 
 
 I believe is . But let us, for the 
 
 time being, keep our attention upon that 
 '^ Feast of St. Partridge," which I sus- 
 pect may be taken as the clasp that binds 
 up the second decade of my life. 
 
 Warrington Manor is a pleasant old house 
 in a Worcestershire valley, with the Breedon 
 Hills as a foreground, a rich grassy plain as 
 middle distance, and the Malverns as a 
 delicate outline against the horizon. In 
 some conditions of the weather the Mal- 
 verns look mountainous; at other times 
 they are graceful unpretentious hills. My 
 Worcestershire friends are very proud of 
 them, and T used to think the whole world 
 had no hills so lovely in their undulating 
 outline as the Malverns. They were gentle 
 and soft in form and colour compared with 
 the mountains of Scarsdale. Since I was a 
 lad at Breedon I have seen many countries 
 and sojourned in many lands. Not long since 
 at fixe o'clock in the morning on the 
 Canadian frontier, at a railway station, I 
 was awakened from a troubled sleep in a
 
 88 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 Pullman car to ^^ hurry up and have break- 
 fast," and there I saw tier upon tier of 
 Malvern Hills, with grey mist floating about 
 their summits, their base reflected in the 
 waters of a calm lake. In this latter respect 
 they eclipsed my Malverns, but of course 
 that only sent my memory back to excuse 
 them for the delightful associations they mir- 
 rored in my memory. The rival scene was I 
 think at a place called Island Pond, and I 
 remember that there were among other 
 things fresh lake trout caught close by the 
 railway track for breakfast. Since those 
 days of the gun and the rod in Worcester- 
 shire, I have dreamed dreams under 
 Italian skies ; I have shot grebe (when 
 no Turk was looking at me) on the 
 Bosphorus ; I have slept on the Danube ; I 
 have looked out from an Erie railway car 
 upon the Delaware near Callicoon ; I have 
 rested in quiet nooks on the Susquehana, and 
 hunted with the Indians far away beyond 
 Quebec. I have seen a tropical landscape 
 lifted out of a grey mist by the rising sun.
 
 MY UNCLE SATS I AM A LUCKY DOG. 89 
 
 have rested by the side of oases in Asian 
 deserts, have sojourned in the famous 
 grazing countries of the Southern States of 
 America, and trodden unexplored islands in 
 the Eastern seas. 
 
 Yet have I never seen fields so green, 
 never heard song-birds carrol so sweetly 
 as I have seen, and heard, on the estate 
 of my late friend Peter Dunstan, Esq. 
 J. P. at Warrington Manor, in the county 
 of Worcester, England. On that festival 
 of St. Partridge, to which I have re- 
 ferred, we met at breakfast at the early 
 hour of half -past seven. The ladies had not 
 come down. We talked of guns, and birds, 
 and dogs, over savoury omelettes, game-pies, 
 stewed grouse, dry toast, claret cup, and coffee. 
 Dunstan was at the head of his table, his 
 wheel-chair having landed him safely in the 
 dining-room before any of his guests had 
 appeared. Squire Dunstan, as the local 
 people called him, had lost the practical use 
 of his legs in an attack of rheumatic gout. 
 He was of a lazy habit of body, though clear
 
 90 A MODERN TLYSSES. 
 
 and active in mind, and he did not appear to 
 regret what was called his infirmity. He 
 had a chair in which he wheeled himself 
 about with great ease and freedom, and this 
 absence of the usual physical action of body 
 made him '' a mere calculating machine,'' 
 Miller said. But he was more than that ; he 
 was a genial, hospitable, well-informed gentle- 
 man, though his hobby was money-making. 
 He had begun life as a London merchant. 
 At three-and-twenty he inherited his father's 
 business and fifteen thousand a year from 
 London rents. Two years later he sold both 
 the one and the other, bought large mineral 
 properties in Wales, extensive manufacturing 
 works in Staffordshire, started a bank in 
 London, and lived to be the richest high 
 sheriff who had ever driven in state to meet 
 the judges at Worcester. The pageantry of 
 that occasion, and the snub put upon him by 
 a local lord who abhorred trade and talked 
 grandly about parvenus^ are traditions of 
 the county. Miss Dunstan has nobly re- 
 venged her father on Lord Trellisford since
 
 MY UNCLE SAYS I AM A LUCKY DOG. 91 
 
 then; and the javelins of the shrievalty 
 ornament the hall of Warrington Manor to 
 this day. 
 
 I remember that at breakfast young 
 Ferris discovered with lively horror that the 
 vicar shot with a muzzle-loader. 
 
 ^' When I was a young fellow," replied 
 the vicar, a ruddy grey-haired cleric of 
 sixty, '' the pleasure of hunting as well as 
 shooting was combined in the celebration of 
 what you are pleased to call the feast of 
 St. Partridge. We did not shoot for the 
 glorification of merely killing ; we found 
 pleasure in the exercise of tramping through 
 the stubbles in the brisk autumn weather ; 
 and we thought nothing of walking 
 twenty miles for ten or a dozen brace of 
 birds." 
 
 **Did you not, indeed?" exclaimed Paul 
 Ferris ; " had you no drivers ?" 
 
 Paul was a fair-haired delicate-looking 
 young fellow, about my own age, and often 
 blushed like a girl.
 
 92 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 '' We drove our own game, Sir," said the 
 vicar. 
 
 ^^Yes," said Paul, ''1 don't think I 
 should like that. I have stood at a corner 
 with the Duke and shot a hundred and fifty 
 brace of pheasants right off the reel." 
 
 The Duke was an illustrious member of 
 the house of Orleans, whose English home 
 was in the valley. 
 
 '' That was simply murder," said the 
 vicar ; ^' to shoot in that fashion, Sir, 
 with all submission to yourself and the 
 Duke, is to degrade sport into mere but- 
 chery." 
 
 Paul Ferris blushed and said he was 
 sorry the vicar thought so; and the Q.C. 
 proceeded to deliver an oration upon the 
 combination of causes which formed what is 
 called the charm of the First of September, 
 such as the vanity of skill as a ^^ shot," the 
 excitement of letting off your piece, the 
 exercise of man's brutal desire to slay, and to 
 temper this depravity the innate love of 
 nature, of trees and fields, and hills and
 
 MY UlsCLE SAYS I AM A LUCKY DOG. 93 
 
 dales and out-door exercise, that is an 
 English characteristic. 
 
 Nobody could say whether Mr. Miller 
 meant what he said, or whether he was 
 amusing himself at our expense. He was 
 probably doing the latter^ while exhibiting 
 himself to us, controversionally ; for he pro- 
 pounded wise propositions on both sides of 
 the question under consideration. 
 
 At the close of his remarks he said ^'Some 
 men like a spice of danger in their sport. The 
 other day a friend of mine, shooting small 
 game on a German estate, quoted this 
 view of that class of Englishmen who seek 
 the dangers of sport on the American prairies. 
 ^ Ah ! ' responded one of the company, 
 ^ you like danger mit your sport. Then 
 you go out shooting mit me. The last 
 time I shoot mine bruder-in-law in ze 
 schtomack!'" 
 
 Thereupon the vicar told a story. The 
 anecdotical vein struck by Miller was quite 
 to his reverence's taste. Hallam had 
 remarked that he feared the wind was getting
 
 94 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 up a little, and that on the hill-side we 
 should have it right in our teeth. 
 
 ^^ Never fire," said the vicar, ^^ when the 
 birds are coming at you with the wind. 
 The plan is to turn round upon them, and 
 get a steady long shot. Do you know Swin- 
 stead, the chairman of the Petty Sessions?" 
 
 '^ Quite well," said Hallam. 
 
 ^^Know his man?" 
 
 ^^ I cannot say that I do." 
 
 *^ Ah, a queer character, old Swinstead ; 
 he has a crotchet for making his man agree 
 with him, whatever he says or professes to 
 think, no matter how extravagant the idea 
 may be. Half valet, half butler, his man is 
 continually with him. He rarely keeps a 
 servant more than six months. They get 
 exasperated with his crotchets, and leave. 
 He has an Irishman now, however, who 
 seems likely to stay. The old fellow put 
 Pat to a severe test the other day, and ould 
 Ireland came out of it with flying colours. 
 It was a particularly boisterous day. '^ There
 
 MY UNCLE SAYS I AM A LUCKY DOG. 95 
 
 is not mucli wind to-day,' said old Swin- 
 stead to his man. Pat hesitated, but he was 
 not lost, as they say the fair ones are who 
 come within the fascination of our friend 
 Miller. ^ I said there is not much wind 
 to-day,' said Pat's master, with special 
 emphasis. ' No, your honour,' said Pat, 
 * not much ; what there is is uncommon high 
 to be sure ! ' " 
 
 The story amused Sir Christopher im- 
 mensely. 
 
 Mr. Miller said he knew Swinstead quite 
 well, and he related how he and my uncle 
 Grantley had bagged there, in one day, a 
 hundred and ninety-five head of miscellaneous 
 game, including sixty brace of birds. 
 
 The vicar insisted that such sport as 
 that bordered on the murderous phase of 
 modern shooting, and the controversy was 
 becoming rather warm, when Colonel Ern- 
 stone hit the vicar slyly upon the unclerical 
 character of a sporting parson. 
 
 ^' Ah ! " said the vicar, ^Hhat reminds me
 
 96 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 of a little incident which occurred in the 
 early life of my worthy diocesan. He was what 
 you call a shooting parson. When he was 
 visiting Lady Hadley — she is very evan- 
 gelical you know — he proposed to accompany 
 her son on a little shooting expedition. The 
 old lady remonstrated mildly, but at length 
 sought consolation in the belief that out of 
 evil would come good. Thomson, her game- 
 keeper, was not at all up to her religious 
 standard, so she urged the bishop to say a 
 few words of exhortation to the man when 
 they should be in the fields together. His 
 lordship took an opportunity, on the return 
 homewards, to advise Thomson to go to 
 church regularly, and read his Bible. ' Why, 
 I do read my Bible,' said the keeper, ^ but 
 I don't find in it any mention of the apostles 
 going a shooting.' ' No, my good man,' 
 said the bishop, ' you are right ; there was 
 no good shooting in Palestine ; so they went 
 fishing.' " 
 
 '^A good story, vicar," said Sir Christopher,
 
 MY UNCLE SAYS I AM A LUCKY DOG. 97 
 
 ^^ it is something like one Mr. Miller once told 
 at the club, only it was about an affair at a 
 theatre ; I never laughed so much. Will you 
 repeat it, Mr. Miller ? " 
 
 ^^ Do you know the cue ?" Miller replied, 
 *^ or I ought to say, Do you remember the 
 case?" 
 
 ^^No, I really do not," said Paul, blush- 
 ing. 
 
 ^^ I am sorry," said the Q.C., ^'but it is 
 just as well that you have neither the cue 
 nor the case, for the story might be a long 
 one, and here comes Hallam." 
 
 All this time Sir Christopher Hallam 
 (or Chris, as the Colonel called him) was 
 out looking after the guns and discussing 
 coveys with the keepers. Our chat ended 
 with the re-appearance of our two friends 
 and their report that the head-keeper with 
 the dogs was coming round from his cottage. 
 
 How the day comes back to me ! Light 
 mists on the hills ; rosy apples hanging in 
 clusters from bending trees in red and brown 
 hedgerows ; dewy gems on the green leaves 
 
 VOL. I. H
 
 98 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 of mangel-wurzel and turnip ; the stubble 
 crackling under our feet ; the rising of the 
 first covey of birds ; the answering echoes of 
 the guns ; the cool shadows of the great 
 elms ; the crows cawing warning signals to 
 each other and sailing away to distant feed- 
 ing grounds ; our rest for luncheon, with the 
 sweet pipe that followed it. And, when the 
 day was done, the bath and the dressing for 
 dinner, and entering the drawing-room de- 
 liciously tired to be received by Helen 
 Dunstan, the Squire, and my dear old uncle, 
 who had driven over from '^ The Cedars " 
 where we lived, half-a-dozen miles from 
 Warrington Manor. 
 
 The Q.C. I remember took Helen Dunstan 
 in to dinner. I was appointed to the honour 
 of escorting the Vicar's wife. The meal was 
 dispatched in a quiet business-like way. 
 There were co£fee and music afterwards in 
 the drawing-room. But it was late when 
 we joined the ladies. The fault was not mine, 
 nor Ernstone's, nor Hallam's. The Squire 
 had some fine old Madeira, and both the
 
 MY UNCLE SAYS I AM A LUCKY DOG. 99 
 
 Vicar and Miller liked Madeira. Moreover 
 Mr. Dunstan gave them his views in regard 
 to certain stocks which were fluctuating con- 
 siderably in the money-market. Miller had 
 made many a cool hundred on the hints he 
 had picked up at Warrington Manor. The 
 Vicar speculated a little, and my uncle, who 
 hated city life, and city men, and banking 
 and railways, ^^and the whole thing. Sir," had 
 nevertheless occasionally bought shares in 
 Companies he knew nothing about and sold 
 them again to persons of whom he was equally 
 ignorant, through a broker whom he had 
 never seen. 
 
 My uncle was comparatively poor; poor in 
 pocket but rich in pride ; a straight-backed, 
 high-collared, warm-hearted man. When 
 first the Dunstans came into the county, some 
 few years prior to this not-to-be-forgotten 
 first of September, he resented the intrusion. 
 Dunstan made too much of a splash with 
 his new horses and carriages for the poorer 
 county families. 
 
 '^ Damme ! " I remember my uncle saying,
 
 100 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 *' if he thinks he is going to drive straight 
 into county society he is mistaken ; not 
 with a team fit for a circus and a carriage 
 like a showman's caravan, at all events." 
 
 But the time soon came when the smaller 
 luminaries of county society, and my uncle 
 among them, found that Peter Dunstan, Esq. 
 was not a bad sort of fellow, and that his 
 Port and Madeira had not their equal in the 
 entire county. 
 
 And on this famous first of September 
 my uncle and her father, I learnt afterwards, 
 had a serious talk about "my future and her 
 future. I sometimes think she must have 
 known about it, for she let her hand rest in 
 mine for a little while when she said '^ good 
 night," and there was an unusual softness 
 in her voice. I thought she was sorry 
 about something, or had a headache. Neither 
 my vanity, nor my discernment, had sug- 
 gested to me that Helen Dunstan, a lovely 
 girl, and heiress to enormous wealth, was in 
 love with me, starchy Dick Grantley's almost 
 penniless nephew. Do you remember only
 
 MY UNCLE SATS I AM A LUCKY DOG. 101 
 
 two seasons ago the portrait-picture of the 
 year at the Royal Academy ? A lady in a 
 riding-habit, leaning against a sleek chestnut. 
 A face of remarkable beauty, indicative, how- 
 ever, of mental strength and great self-con- 
 trol, a liquid gray eye, rich brown hair 
 dressed close to the head, an elegant figure, 
 though somewhat slight ; and in her eyes a 
 tender thoughtful expression. '^ Portrait of 
 Miss Dunstan,'' you will see in the cata- 
 logue ; though on that first of September 
 of this present history my uncle slapped 
 me on the back, and said, '' Horace, my boy, 
 you are a lucky dog!" 
 
 I see him now on the box-seat of his 
 phaeton, with the vicar and Mrs. Martin sit- 
 ting inside, two bright lamps flashing upon 
 the roadway, Sandy Mackenzie at the horses' 
 heads ; I see old Dunstan in his wheel-chair 
 at the porch, and Miss Dunstan, with an Indian 
 shawl flung over her head, come out to say 
 *^ good night " to their neighbours. I 
 see the lights dancing along the road in 
 the distance ; and as the Squire wheels him-
 
 102 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 self back into the library I see myself 
 standing there with Helen's soft hand in 
 mine; and I find it all a dream, with 
 strange unlooked-for incidents in it; and 
 another woman (who has no need to beckon 
 me, for I am at her feet only too soon for 
 my own peace) filling the early days of my 
 life with a bitter sorrow, leading to a serious 
 difference between myself and my uncle, 
 and giving, if I may so describe it, the cue 
 to Fate for the commencement of a series 
 of trials, misfortunes, and adventures, which 
 in some respects justify the publication of 
 these volumes.
 
 103 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN. 
 
 You will have gathered from the closing 
 picture of my last chapter that I was a guest 
 at Warrington Manor. 
 
 Considering the natural vanity of youth 
 and the distinction which a young fellow 
 obtains among his comrades from any 
 special attention shown to him by a pretty 
 and desirable girl, it was no very terrible 
 crime that I committed in responding warmly 
 to Helen Dunstan's little kindnesses to me, 
 without any other motive than that of feed- 
 ing my personal vanity. 
 
 Confession of a fault is said to constitute 
 at least half atonement. I was interested in
 
 104 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 my host's daughter, I liked to hear her talk, 
 to draw her out, to excite her interest in my 
 opinions, to hear her own, and to monopolise 
 her attention. Sir Christopher Hallam did 
 not care about my selfishness, because he 
 was engaged to Colonel Ernstone's daughter. 
 Paul Ferris, I flattered myself, was slightly 
 jealous of me. George Harmer was in the 
 position, more or less, of a guest ^'on suf- 
 ferance," and his nature was both gentle and 
 retiring. He would not even have dreamed 
 of competition with any of Dunstan's visitors 
 in anything, unless perhaps one of them had 
 stood upon his scaffolding in the music-room 
 and challenged him to a match at painting 
 Apollos playing on pipes, and great-god 
 Pans '' down by the reeds in the river." 
 Stephen Miller was well known as '' not a 
 marrying man ; " and he had not altogether 
 an enviable reputation among women. It 
 was therefore a poor sort of triumph which 
 I sought in engrossing as much as pos- 
 sible the attention of Helen Dunstan. It 
 might have been better for me, for her too.
 
 WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN. 105 
 
 had she succeeded at that time in awakening 
 in me those sentiments of love and admira- 
 tion which were only dormant within my 
 heart. Unfortunately for both of us she did 
 not hold the key that was to unlock them. 
 
 On the second day of the partridge-shoot- 
 ing she drove with her father to the luncheon 
 rendezvous and assisted at that delightful 
 ceremony. Dressed in blue serge, a long 
 plait of golden-brown hair hanging down her 
 back, a spray of partridge feathers in her 
 small hat, she was a very Diana in appearance, 
 yet somehow I christened her Donna Quixote, 
 and for the reason that her companion, a 
 friend and governess and waiting-maid and 
 companion in one, reminded me of a female 
 Sancho Panza. Susan Dobbs was ten years 
 older than her mistress, and looked it. 
 A crabbed, clever, unsophisticated, not ill- 
 natured woman, she had an affectionate 
 admiration for Helen, and seconded her in 
 all her views, opinions, and doings. They 
 talked together of everything and every- 
 body.
 
 106 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 After luncheon, while Squire Dunstan 
 sat in his carriage smoking, and reading a 
 morning paper that had come down from 
 town by express (carriage and horses were 
 under a shady tree on the road by the gate 
 where we had refreshed ourselves and counted 
 our bag), Helen and Susan seemed inclined 
 to delay their departure. I was tired and 
 gave up my gun to a business visitor whom 
 the Squire had driven over from the Manor, 
 and so we sat, or lolled, upon the rugs and 
 cushions, which the servants had carried to 
 the rendezvous, and discoursed of many 
 things. 
 
 '* Do you know Thdrese Ernstone ? '' 
 Helen asked me. 
 
 "• No, but she is to come on a short visit 
 to ^ The Cedars ' with her father." 
 
 ^^ A beautiful girl," said Helen. 
 
 **If she were not too dark," remarked 
 Sancho — Susan I mean, I beg her pardon. 
 
 ^^Dark, is she?" I asked. 
 
 '^ Very," said Susan. 
 
 ^* Don't you like dark people ?"
 
 WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN. 107 
 
 *^Not girls," snapped Susan, balancing 
 herself uneasily on a camp-stool. 
 
 '' Glad I am not a girl," I said. 
 
 *' You may well be glad," she answered. 
 
 *^Why?" 
 
 ^^ Otherwise you would not be so popular 
 at the Manor." 
 
 '' Miss Dobbs is in a controversial 
 humour," rejoined Helen, smiling, ^^I am 
 sure Th^r^se is popular here, I only wish 
 she came oftener." 
 
 *^Sir Christopher, I suppose, must be 
 considered a happy fellow,'' I said. 
 
 "If to be loved by a girl, who is both 
 pretty and clever, should make him happy," 
 replied my hostess. 
 
 "And to know that he will have no 
 mother-in-law when he marries," croaked 
 Miss Dobbs. 
 
 " Susan, you are really bright to-day if 
 you are a little sour," said my hostess. 
 
 " I hate fools ! " she answered quickly. 
 
 "Now that is rude. Miss Dobbs," said 
 Helen, " I propose that you and I, Mr.
 
 108 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 Durand go and sit in the carriage and talk to 
 father ; he will be civil to us at any rate." 
 
 Miss Dunstan smiled pleasantly as she 
 said so. Susan rose and curtseyed and then 
 resumed her uncomfortable seat. 
 
 We walked towards the carriage, Helen 
 and I, and past it, the Squire being still too 
 busy with his paper to be troubled with con- 
 versation. I assisted her over an adjacent 
 stile, and the geatle influences of the time, 
 the pastoral beauties of the scene, her gra- 
 cious manner, and a certain music in her 
 voice that touched me, would quite possibly 
 have thawed my senseless heart completely, 
 but for the war between France and 
 Germany. 
 
 ^'An odd character, Miss Dobbs," I 
 said. 
 
 ^' She is very ; but I like her for it." 
 
 " And she knows you do.'' 
 
 '' You do not think she says these brusque 
 things to please me ? Oh no, it is her nature. 
 Her mother married twice, and her step- 
 father was a brute."
 
 WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN. 109 
 
 *'I have had a similar experience," I 
 answered, ^' but I do not say rude things to 
 people on that account." 
 
 '' Oh, but you are difFereift ! Susan says 
 she would have married, only for the horrible 
 example of mankind which her stepfather 
 gave her. You are right in saying she is an 
 odd character, and he must also have been 
 odd — the man whom she threw over." 
 
 ^^ She threw him over— did she ? " 
 
 '^ Yes, and the other day he died, making 
 a will in her favour. He left her three 
 thousand pounds, out of gratitude to her for 
 letting him o:ff a bad bargain. Those were 
 his very words." 
 
 ^^And has that soured her disposition 
 still more ? " 
 
 ^^Not at all. She cannot help laughing 
 at the poor dear man, she says, whenever she 
 thinks of the nagging life she would have 
 led him." 
 
 '^ She is funny." 
 
 '• And as good and true a creature as 
 ever lived."
 
 110 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 ^' I will try and like her then, if only to 
 please you," I said. 
 
 '^ Do you think she does not like you ? " 
 Miss Dunstan asked, pausing in the shadow 
 of an elm and confronting me. 
 
 '' It has not occurred to me to think 
 whether she does or not ; but, judging from 
 appearances, I should say she does not." 
 
 '' Oh, but she does, very much," said the 
 Squire's daughter, *' she thinks you hand- 
 some, good, manly, and I cannot tell you 
 what ! " 
 
 '' 1 thank her, and all the more that I 
 hear her good opinion of me from your 
 lips." 
 
 ^^ Oh," said my pretty companion, and it 
 flattered me to notice that she blushed. 
 
 After a somewhat awkward pause we 
 walked on towards the next stile. 
 
 " It must be a terrible thing to have a 
 step-father," said the squire's daughter, ^' but 
 far worse to have a step-mother. A great 
 lady — at least so the people called her — 
 tried to marry my widowed father a year or
 
 WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN. Ill 
 
 two ago. But bless his dear heart he loved 
 me, and the memory of my mother, too much 
 to be caught. Ah, if my mother had lived, 
 I should have been the happiest girl in the 
 world. Not that 1 remember her; I was 
 too young when she died. Mr. Grantley was 
 telling us the other day that your mother is 
 very beautiful." 
 
 '' Yes," I said. 
 
 It seemed to me that Miss Dunstan was 
 talking without thinking, and I found myself 
 somewhat bewildered as to my share in a 
 conversation, which was growing forced. 
 
 ^^ It is a serious responsibility to be 
 beautiful," I said. 
 
 '^ Indeed, '^ she answered. 
 
 " Do you not feel that it is ? " 
 
 '' I feel the compliment of your question," 
 she answered smiling, ^' and accept it for what 
 it is worth." 
 
 ^' You think I am not sincere?" I 
 asked. 
 
 " In what respect ? " was her answer. 
 
 I began to be conscious that I was tread-
 
 112 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 ing upon dangerous ground, but it seemed 
 to be a very pleasant path, nevertheless. 
 
 '' In my admiration of you.'' 
 
 We had reached the last stile. She 
 placed her soft hand in mine. I pressed it 
 as she mounted it. She was about to speak 
 when a messenger, bursting with his great 
 news, demanded our attention. 
 
 ^^Where be the Squire?" 
 
 <^ What Squire?" 
 
 '' Squire Dunstan." 
 
 *' Yonder, in the lane." 
 
 ** Please tell him I come from Wood- 
 norton, and the Emperor has surrendered 
 to the King o' Prussia and M^Mahon's army 
 be cut all to pieces." 
 
 * * * * 
 
 Well might Susan Panza say she hated 
 fools. I lived to learn that her shot was 
 levelled at me. The highest point of human 
 happiness for any man, in Susan's esti- 
 mation, was achieved in being loved by 
 Helen Dunstan. She knew that I was that 
 man. For me not to know it argued that I
 
 WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN. 113 
 
 was not only a fool, but unworthy of 
 the honour conferred upon me. Had it 
 not been for the Emperor of the French 
 surrendering at Sedan I believe I should 
 not only have discovered that Helen loved 
 me but that I loved Helen. In that case 
 this story might have come to an end with 
 this chapter, or might never have been 
 written. 
 
 It was a mutual impulse on the part of 
 both of us to rush back to the carriage 
 with the news, for the Duke d'Aumale was 
 a neighbour of ours. Indeed some of his 
 people, not he, nor any of the princes of 
 his house, but some of his friends, were 
 shooting in the stubbles, not half-a-mile 
 away from the spot where the Squire was 
 reading The Times, 
 
 '^ Great heaven!" said the Squire, ^^what 
 a collapse ! '' 
 
 ^^ One can hardly realise it,'' said Helen, 
 ^^ when one looks around at this peaceful 
 scene about us." 
 
 ^^ And yonder among the trees lies the 
 
 VOL. I. I
 
 114 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 shooting-box of the exiled princes!" said the 
 Squire. 
 
 *^ Will they be happier for the fall of their 
 foe, I wonder ! " pondered Colonel Ernstone, 
 coming upon the scene, accompanied by 
 Hall am and the Q.C. 
 
 ^* We heard of it from the Woodnorton 
 fellows," said the Q.C. '^Hallam shot a hare 
 on their side the hedge, and apologised ; then 
 they asked us if we had heard the news; they 
 were handing their guns over to the men, 
 and going back to the house." 
 
 " And has the looked-for change in their 
 fortunes really come! " exclaimed the vicar. 
 Is not Napoleon, after all, happier than 
 they? Xerxes wept in the zenith of his 
 glory. Philosophy says he was no longer 
 melancholy after the defeat of his forces." 
 
 ^^You think it must be a relief for the 
 Emperor to have come to the end — to lay 
 down his sword, and with it all the misery 
 of watching and waiting?" asked the Q.C. 
 
 ^^ There is always a certain kind of peace 
 at the end of anything," replied the vicar,
 
 WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN. 115 
 
 ^^even the great CardinaPs apostrophe to 
 closing greatness has a smack of comfort in it. 
 The banker who has struggled against a 
 run upon his coffers till the bitter end must 
 find a sensation of relief in the closing doors. 
 I am sure Mr. Miller will tell us that the 
 culprit standing through a long trial sits down 
 at last with a calm sense of relief even at 
 the adverse verdict." 
 
 Ah ! the poor Emperor ; if a little party 
 of English sportsmen could not go out into 
 the September meadows to shoot partridges 
 without visions of war and carnage, what 
 dreams must have haunted the soul of him 
 who sought in vain for death amidst the 
 blood-stained ruins of Sedan ! 
 
 We shot no more that day, and I re- 
 mained the fool Susan Panza thought me; 
 and all because of that wicked war between 
 France and Germany. 
 
 i2
 
 116 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 DISCOURSES OF CRITICISM, LOVE, AND MARRIAGE. 
 
 I have heard novelists speak of the 
 difficulty of beginning a story. My chief 
 trouble, having begun, is to get my narra- 
 tive to advance. The natural tendency to 
 relate all the incidents of one's life in detail 
 delays progress, more particularly when it is 
 thought desirable to say something about 
 one's boyhood. Moreover a writer setting 
 down his own experiences is apt to exagge- 
 rate the importance of incidents that remain 
 vividly in his memory. If there is any 
 constructive art in my method of procedure, 
 it will be found in the fact that I deal, in 
 the earliest chapters, with two decades of
 
 DISCOURSES OF LOVE AND MARRIAGE. 117 
 
 my life, the first two ten years. These two 
 periods are covered at the outset, and then 
 dealt with retrospectively and prospectively. 
 The two decades will be completed in this 
 and the eighth chapter of my reminiscences, 
 and the ninth launches me into the third, 
 with, I hope, sufficient impetus to carry me 
 into the calmer waters of the fourth, to sail 
 eventually into port, weather-beaten but 
 sound and seaworthy. I have striven, in the 
 interest of the reader, to devote my attention 
 to landmarks in my career, to affairs that are 
 entertaining in themselves, outside the ques- 
 tions of developing character or plot. To 
 tell the truth, this history of life and ad- 
 venture has no plot. Whether it has even 
 a hero remains to be seen. 
 
 If it has a hero I am he. In a romance 
 of real life it is an advantage to the reader, 
 when the author, intending to be his own 
 hero, boldly avows the fact at the beginhig. 
 In that case he usually adopts the simplest 
 form of narrative, which is the autobio- 
 graphic. ^'Robinson Crusoe,'' ^^ David Cop-
 
 118 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 perfield," and '' Gil Bias/' were written on 
 these lines. I venture with all humility to 
 adopt something of the mechanism of the 
 works in question. Their illustrious authors 
 wrote in the first person singular and as- 
 sumed to be their own heroes. I, who am 
 not illustrious, emulate the method of these 
 great men, adapting it however to the 
 current taste of the moment, which is in- 
 clined to be impatient of any elaboration of 
 details. Telegrams have killed the popu- 
 larity of narratives which relate minute 
 points. Journalistic sketches and personal 
 gossip have called into existence a new form 
 of novel. The newspaper is the chief 
 literary influence of the day. It encourages 
 broad effects in art. The stage responds in 
 spectacle and tableaux. It sets the fashion 
 of a lighter style of writing than that which 
 guided the hands of Smollett and Scott. The 
 world has less time to think than ever it had. 
 Readers are more anxious to arrive at results 
 than they were even as recently as the days 
 of Thackeray and Dickens. Students of 
 Mudie's and Smith's are known to go so far
 
 DISCOURSES OF LOVE AND MARRIAGE. 119 
 
 in this direction of impatient curiosity as to 
 read the third volume of a novel first, and 
 even then begining with the last chapter. 
 Richardson would have driven these accom- 
 plished people crazy. 
 
 The story-teller who loves his art must 
 still, however, fall back more or less upon 
 the classic models ; and possibly '^ The De- 
 cameron " is in many respects the best of 
 them. This mention of the immortal writers 
 of fiction may be regarded by some as an 
 invitation to comparisons which may lead to 
 unpleasant criticism. I cannot help that. 
 Life would not be worth having at the price 
 of always being concerned about what 
 critics may say of your work. Moreover 
 for one unkind judge there are twenty ready 
 to over-estimate the worth of a fairly enter- 
 taining book, and the world is big enough 
 for both authors and critics. In my own 
 case, The Superfine Revieio of late years has 
 discoursed so frequently on my deficiencies 
 that it has ceased to be instructive. I think 
 it was at Burlington House where Lord 
 Beaconsfield, speaking of the duties and
 
 120 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 desires of Government in regard to the 
 advancement of Art, intimated that it was 
 no forecast of adverse criticism that stayed 
 his action in a certain direction, because 
 he knew well enough, whether he ad- 
 vanced or remained quiescent, his conduct 
 would be objected to all the same. I have 
 a similar sense of comfort in regard to The 
 Superfine. Time was when I endeavoured 
 to find wisdom in its reviews. That was 
 in my salad days. Latterly I have become 
 acquainted with more than one of the 
 young sparks, and talked philosophy with 
 more than one of the old fogies, who write 
 in that department of the paper which is 
 condescendingly devoted to literature. More- 
 over I have written ^^criticisms'' myself, some 
 of them to order, and know what it is for an 
 author or publisher to be under the ban of a 
 journal that criticises to live rather than lives 
 to criticise. Thackeray knew this, and it is 
 a fine thing to be in good company. The 
 illustrious author of Vanity Fair and Esmond 
 had his critical pest in the shape of The
 
 DISCOURSES OF LOVE AND MARRIAGE. 121 
 
 Superfine Bevieto, and showed that a great 
 writer is after all only mortal in resenting 
 the attentions of so small an insect. Uncle 
 Toby found the world large enough for the 
 blue-bottle and himself, and The Superfine 
 Review has as much right to live as Thack- 
 eray had, and as much right to exercise its 
 functions. There are land-rats and water- 
 rats. There are ^'skunks" according to 
 Eeade, and ^' bummers '' according to Jona- 
 than. There is the vermin of the forest and 
 the vermin of the city, and both have their 
 mysterious uses. That they may not multiply 
 and become intolerable, Nature invents 
 checks for them, checks of wolf and ant- 
 eater ; man supplements Nature with checks 
 of trap and gun ; and so the world wags and 
 the balances are maintained. Thackeray 
 should have remembered the counterpoises 
 there are in London journalism against 
 Superfine Reviews^ and then he would not 
 have been tempted to make some people 
 think he had been stung by a hornet when 
 he had only been tickled by a fly.
 
 122 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 These remarks are what would be c?.lled 
 by a dramatist an '' aside," or in more ex- 
 plicit instructions he would mark them down 
 as '^ spoken apart." Matter of this kind 
 nevertheless helps to convey useful informa- 
 tion to an audience ; and in the present 
 instance the reader, which is my audience, 
 will have gathered from this ^^ aside" that 
 during my career I have done something 
 more than wield a dilettante pen for a fashion- 
 able magazine. How I first came to be asso- 
 ciated with journalism was in this wise. 
 Among the frequent visitors at '' The Cedars" 
 was Mr, Peregrine Fox, who controlled the 
 destinies of the Breedon County Times, 
 which in its turn governed the political 
 fortunes of the western division of the 
 county, and more particularly of the little 
 town from which it took its title. Mr. 
 Fox was an enthusiastic Tory. In that 
 respect his conversation commended itself 
 to my uncle and to the Vicar, his old friend 
 a-nd companion. Inspired probably by the 
 literary and artistic atmosphere in which I
 
 DISCOURSES OF LOVE AND MARRIAGE. 123 
 
 was born, I had not removed to '^ The 
 Cedars'' very long before I flashed my 
 maiden quill in The Breedon Times^ the 
 occasion being a question of field-paths and 
 rights of way which had agitated ^^ The 
 Cedars " for an entire hunting season, 
 beginning at breakfast before the meet, to be 
 taken ujd again with the discussion of the 
 day's run at the inevitable dinner-party 
 afterwards. I maintained the sanctity of 
 field-paths and the freedom of established 
 rights of way, with sympathetic references 
 to the Garden of Eden, and eloquent pro- 
 tests against the levelling tendencies of up- 
 starts and parvenus. Recollections of the 
 footway across the fields over which Connie 
 Gardner directed me to walk home, on that 
 day when we parted on the white Derby- 
 shire highway, gave a poetic turn to my 
 defence of field-paths. Hatred of my canting, 
 time-serving, office-seeking, brow-beating 
 step-father put a sting into my denun- 
 ciations of those levellers who sought to 
 raise themselves into a spurious notoriety
 
 124 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 by selfish and wanton attacks on the institu- 
 tions of the country. My letter was signed 
 '' Maximilian Ulysses," in memory of my 
 father, and also as a hint to Mr. Welby, 
 M.P., of the authorship. I sometimes won- 
 der whether I am a Conservative in politics 
 because he is on the other side ; that, is sup- 
 posing I am in any sense a politician. I 
 think that whatever cause Mr. Welby advo- 
 cated I should oppose it. Therefore I can 
 hardly be regarded as conscientiously be- 
 longing to the Tories, the Radicals, the 
 Whigs, or the Liberals. Mr. Peregrine Fox 
 wrote an editorial article on my letter, and 
 proclaimed to the county the possession of a 
 new writer who would one day make his 
 name known throughout the world. He 
 congratulated the Western Division that the 
 new light was on the side of those consti- 
 tutional principles which had made England 
 great and free, and that it would illuminate 
 the fallacies and dogmas of the Opposition 
 in such a way as would make them palpable 
 to the most superficial judgment. What
 
 DISCOURSES OF LOVE AND MARRIAGE. 125 
 
 illuminating power the local scribbler's pen 
 possessed had however a tendency to seek 
 satisfaction outside the arena of party politics. 
 Such books as I had read, when a child at 
 my father's knee, and such works as I found 
 in honest Dick Grantley's library, stimulated 
 in my mind a taste for romance, for travel, 
 and for history ; and it seemed as if the 
 very nickname Welby had given me was 
 destined to assist my aspirations ; for just 
 as the mountains of Scarsdale filled my fancy 
 with imaginary journeys to the other side, 
 so in after-years did some barrier con- 
 tinually present itself to my imagination 
 as a border-land between me and my hopes, 
 a border-land to be crossed, a border-land 
 to be left behind in my travels and adven- 
 tures. ^'Master Ulysses" in the mouth of 
 my father-in-law, a blight upon me for the 
 time as the scarlet letter was upon Hester 
 Prynne, became in future years a talisman 
 to noble effort, just as the scarlet letter in 
 time became a symbol of virtue and religion. 
 We work out our destinies through devious
 
 126 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 paths, and the opposing darts, with which 
 Destiny appears to wound us, are merely 
 the smarts that spur us on to the reali- 
 sation of the better Fate, which Fortune 
 hides behind the obstacles that are factors 
 in our success. 
 
 And how utterly blind we are to what is 
 to come ! But for my uncle Grrantley I 
 might have been, heaven knows what ! Under 
 the severe discipline and brutality of Mr. 
 Jonas Welby, a prig, perhaps a coward, a 
 complacent follower of his self-assertive creed. 
 Time under controlling circumstances might 
 have beaten all the spirit of adventure out of 
 me, and twisted my pen into an academic 
 instrument for prodding authors in the Super- 
 fine Hevieiv, The robust old English fashions 
 of ^^The Cedars" developed the best qualities 
 of my nature, and the romantic virtues and 
 artistic instincts of my Anglo-French father, 
 with his views of noblesse oblige, no doubt 
 tempered in me the unconscious arrogance 
 of '^ county family " traditions. How utterly 
 blind, I repeat, we are to the future ! I have
 
 DISCOURSES OF LOVE AND MARRIAGE. 127 
 
 every reason to believe that but for an acci- 
 dental circumstance I should have married 
 Helen Dunstan a year after the second 
 decade of my life, a rough sketch of which I 
 am endeavouring to present to the reader. 
 
 Helen Dunstan was considered to be the 
 one great prize worth a young man's 
 running for in the matrimonial market of 
 the Western Division of Worcestershire. 
 She was handsome, clever, rich, and, as Sir 
 Christopher Hallam put it to me, there was 
 ^^no nonsense about her." Above all, as 
 Susan Panza had remarked, the man who 
 won her would not be hampered with a 
 mother-in-law. Her father was an old man 
 and a widower. He rolled in wealth, or, 
 to put it still more literally, wheeled in 
 it. His love for Helen was only second 
 to his love of money-making, and then his 
 delight in la gourmandise may be said to 
 have ranked third in his passions. Neither 
 controlling her choice of a husband, nor 
 limiting his endowment of her until his 
 death, Peter Dunstan was a most desirable
 
 128 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 father-in-law and friend. After that night 
 when she let her hand lie gently in mine, 
 my uncle told me that ^Hhe course was 
 clear " for me. 
 
 ^^ If," he said, ^' you can gain the girl's 
 consent, you need not fear that he will refuse 
 to ratify the bond." 
 
 We were sitting in the old-fashioned 
 porch of ^' The Cedars," on a hot evening 
 after dinner, having (an unusual occur- 
 rence) dined alone. Sandy had decanted, 
 under my uncle's supervision, a dusty 
 bottle of port- wine. It was still day-light, 
 though the old church clock across the river 
 had struck seven ; and it was still hot, though 
 neither summer nor winter made any differ- 
 ence to my uncle's habit of taking a few 
 glasses of Port or Madeira after dinner. He 
 held up his glass, before the opening of the 
 porch where the twilight had just began to 
 suggest its poetic presence, to watch the 
 delicate indications of Time's tardy flight in 
 the shape of those tiny leaf -like relics called 
 beeswing. The scrutiny being satisfactory.
 
 DISCOURSES OF LOVE AND MARRIAGE. 129 
 
 he sipped the golden liquor and turned 
 it over on his tongue, which, thus pleasantly 
 loosened, began to wag at me. 
 
 " Marriage becomes a duty when the 
 woman is above reproach, and her wealth is 
 as abundant as her charms,'' he said, in refer- 
 ence to a remark of mine which questioned 
 the desirability of a young fellow entering 
 into the responsibility which my uncle had 
 discarded. 
 
 ^^ Love is a factor in the business, is it 
 not?" I asked. 
 
 ^' No, Sir, love is for boarding-school 
 wenches and penniless adventurers.'' 
 
 '^ That is a new reading ; it is not in 
 Burton." 
 
 '^Perhaps not; but, if I remember rightly, 
 he dwelt on the necessity of money. Sandy ! '' 
 
 '' Yes, your honour," said Sandy, who 
 was sweeping up the first leaves of the 
 autumn, where they had dotted the green 
 sward with brown and gold and red. 
 
 ^^ On the second shelf of the book-case, 
 nearest the fireplace, in the dining-room, 
 
 VOL. I. K
 
 130 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 you will see a book bound in parchment, and 
 labelled ' The Anatomy of Melancholy ; ' bring 
 it here, Sandy." 
 
 *' I will, your honour," said Sandy, dis- 
 appearing. 
 
 '' Respect and mutual forbearance one for 
 the other," said my uncle, '^ is the secret of 
 a happy married life." 
 
 ^' Uncle Grantley!" I said, with that 
 affectionate submissiveness which always 
 characterised my intercourse with him, 
 '^ may I ask how you know, since you do 
 not speak by experience ?" 
 
 ^' Damme, Horace!" he said, ^^do you 
 think I was reared like the nigger in that 
 American woman's horribly interesting book 
 you brought here last week? Experience! 
 Do you wish to imply that I had no father 
 or mother ? " 
 
 '' No, Sir, heaven forbid ! But, in such 
 serious business of life as marriage, the best 
 opinion is surely that of personal experience," 
 1 replied. 
 
 ^^ I am glad to hear you call it business,
 
 DISCOURSES OF LOVE AND MARRIAGE. 131 
 
 and not love," he said, ^^ whereby you show 
 an inclination to a proper estimate of the 
 position in which you stand. My father 
 and mother were the happiest couple in these 
 parts. They did not marry for love. The 
 estates of their people were adjacent. My 
 mother had a heavy jointure. My father lost 
 a good deal of it at a gambling club in 
 London. But they never forgot the respect 
 they mutually owed to each other. My father 
 treated her all his life with the politeness 
 due to her rank. He found continual pleasure 
 in her society. He never neglected a wish or 
 a desire which she expressed, or even hinted 
 at. She adorned his life with her many vir- 
 tues. She smoothed their mutual paths with 
 a fair estate ; she was a beautiful woman, and 
 a good mother. He committed a great act 
 of folly in staking half her estate on a bet 
 in a London hell ; but he laid the lesson of it 
 to heart all his life, and managed their 
 joint properties in after-life so well that they 
 recovered from the strain that he had foolishly 
 put upon them. Gambling was the vice of
 
 132 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 the rich in those days, and it was not confined 
 to the men. Lady Bartley, over the river 
 yonder, pawned her family jewels, and lost 
 the Nettley property at cards." 
 
 '^ Would it be impertinent to ask why you 
 never married, uncle ? " 
 
 '^ No, Sir ; the necessity never arose, and 
 the opportunity never presented itself. I was 
 an only son, very fond of my home, warmly 
 attached to my mother, and a rake ; a curious 
 mixture, eh ? I never met the woman whom 
 I could have consented to live with, and most 
 women, I believe, regarded me as not the 
 sort of fellow they could trust. Ah! here 
 comes your mentor, Mr. Burton, a melan- 
 choly rhapsodist, who has made more women 
 false, and more men desire that they should 
 be so, than any writer outside Ovid. 
 
 '^ Do you think so, really?" 
 
 ^' I do. But there is one point in which 
 he may be commended. Here you are. He 
 mentions John de Medicis as so sensible of 
 the power of riches, that when on his dying 
 bed, calling before him his sons to give them
 
 DISCOURSES OF LOVE AND MARRIAGE. 133 
 
 his blessing, he exclaimed, ' My mind is 
 at rest at this awful moment, when I re- 
 flect that I shall leave you, my children, in 
 the possession of good health and abundant 
 riches.' " 
 
 '^ Yes," I said, *^ that is all very well, but 
 there is nothing in that speech which com- 
 mends a man's marrying for money." 
 
 ^'No, nor is there in mine, Mr. Critic, 
 I simply say that it is a young fellow's duty 
 to marry, and that what you call love is not 
 a necessary clause in the contract." 
 
 ^^ Burton does not support your views." 
 
 '^I have already said that Burton is a 
 fool on the question of love." 
 
 '^ But you have quoted him on the ques- 
 tion of money. I do not underestimate the 
 value of riches, and I hope to earn money 
 enough without sacrificing my liberty." 
 
 ^' Pooh ! Your liberty ! Why, damme, 
 the best fellows in the county are mad to get 
 into your shoes." 
 
 '^ Why, uncle?" 
 
 '^ They see what everybody can see, that
 
 184 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 Dunstan's daughter is ready to say yes to 
 you the moment you ask her." 
 
 ^' Do you believe that, uncle ?" 
 
 ^'Ido, Horace, and I congratulate you, 
 my boy. With such an alliance there is 
 nothing you may not hope for. Damme, 
 you might go down to Derbyshire and con- 
 test the county seat with Welby. I suppose 
 the newspaper men would speak of such a 
 contest as a public scandal. But " 
 
 '^ I wouldn't care for that," I exclaimed, 
 interrupting the dear old squire. 
 
 '^ Here's your health, then," said my 
 uncle, '' Horace Durand, Esquire, Member 
 of Parliament, ^ic^ Jonas Welby, defeated!" 
 
 Fate, if it could be idealised into an on- 
 looking personification, might have laughed 
 at my fond uncle's predictions. 
 
 We continued to talk, off and on, till 
 bed'time about the Dunstans, more parti- 
 cularly of Helen, and my future prospects. 
 I confessed that I found the young lady's 
 society agreeable to me, and that I would 
 do nothing to obstruct my uncle's hopes
 
 DISCOURSES OF LOVE AND MARRIAGE. 135 
 
 in that direction. I did not hesitate to 
 say that if his theory were correct as to 
 the conditions of a haj)py marriage I was 
 hopeful that the end might be as he 
 wished. My respect for Miss Dunstan 
 was unbounded. I admitted that. I also 
 agreed with my uncle in regarding myself as 
 highly complimented by the notice she had 
 taken of me. I did not tell him that I 
 feared what he had said would exercise a 
 certain amount of constraint upon my future 
 intercourse with her. Hitherto I had been 
 perfectly free and unconstrained in my at- 
 tentions to her, and we had talked with per- 
 fect self-control about all manner of things, 
 and I had always been impressed with her 
 common-sense views of life and her intel- 
 lectual superiority to the other young ladies 
 whom I was in the habit of meeting in 
 society. 
 
 *' Very well," said my uncle, over the long 
 clay pipe which he invariably smoked in com- 
 pany with a glass of punch before going to 
 bed, ^'with the understanding that you will
 
 136 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 try and not baulk me in my hopes for your 
 welfare, I have now to propose to you a little 
 relaxation of a kind that you will fully ap- 
 preciate." 
 
 '' Yes, uncle." 
 
 '* The grand tour, at least that is what 
 they called an excursion to Italy, France, 
 Germany, et cetera, when I was a boy. 
 Tom Ernstone will be here to-morrow with 
 his daughter Th^rese. You must not fall 
 in love with her. She is promised to Sir 
 Christopher Hallam. They are on their 
 way to Tom's place from London, she to 
 remain there for the winter, he to travel on 
 the continent, partly for pleasure, partly for 
 business. I have asked him to take you along 
 with him. Does that meet your wishes ?" 
 
 '' You are too good to me, my dear 
 Uncle and my dear friend," I answered. 
 
 '^ Not a bit of it," he said ; ^' go into 
 Bredon to-morrow and get whatever Ern- 
 stone says you may require, and pack your 
 trunks to be ready at the end of the week — 
 Good night ! It is no good signing yourself
 
 DISCOURSES OF LOVE AND MARRIAGE. 137 
 
 Ulysses unless you travel ; and, by the way, 
 it is out of character unless you marry, d'ye 
 see?" 
 
 " Yes, Sir." 
 
 ^^ Good night, Horace Durand, Esquire, 
 Member of Parliament, vice Welby sent to 
 the devil ! " 
 
 '' Good night. Uncle."
 
 138 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 COLONEL ERNSTONe's SECRET. 
 
 Colonel Tom Ernstone is well known in 
 London Society. He is a retired Indian 
 officer. He had a command during the 
 mutiny, was wounded and decorated on the 
 field. A cynical travelled man, I had al- 
 ready an experience of him which had not 
 set me against so-called misanthropes. When 
 I was fifteen he had been good enough to 
 allow me to accompany him to Algiers, 
 whither he went on a mission of some po- 
 litical importance. My uncle encouraged 
 rather than suppressed my desire to see the 
 world. A storm in the Bay of Biscay had, 
 however, somewhat damped my ardour for a 
 time, and my continual subjection to sea-
 
 COLONEL ERNSTONe's SECRET. ' 139 
 
 sickness might in a less ardent enthusiast 
 have proved a perpetual bar to the ex- 
 ploration of foreign countries. I often 
 wondered if Ulysses himself was sick. 
 Nelson they say never overcame the nausea 
 produced by ocean travel. Nor shall I, 
 which convinces me, and I say it without 
 vanity, that I am endowed with a fair 
 amount of personal courage. To delibe- 
 rately undertake an ocean voyage, knowing 
 that you will suffer the tortures of death, 
 without the relief of dying, is in my opinion 
 an effort of the highest courage. 
 
 At seventeen 1 was not much of a com- 
 panion for Colonel Ernstone though he had a 
 habit of treating me as if I were a man. 
 At twenty he talked to me and consulted 
 me as freely as if I had been a veteran 
 like himself. I saw his daughter for the 
 first time on the occasion of her visit to 
 ^' The Cedars." She was ^^ sweet and 
 twenty." A brunette with blue eyes, 
 English in manner, but somewhat foreign 
 in appearance. She might have sat for a
 
 140 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 Norman maiden of the days of William, but 
 for her eyes that were Saxon in their placid 
 depths of blue. My uncle told me that the 
 Colonel's aunt presided over his house. 
 
 '' Tom has for years/' said my uncle, 
 ^' posed as a cynic. He is a kind fellow be- 
 neath that affectation. Th^rese knows it. 
 So does his housekeeper. There is a romantic 
 secret in Tom's early history. Nobody except 
 one or two men who have known him inti- 
 mately suspects it. At his London club he is 
 looked upon as a man of the world, who accepts 
 life as it is and makes the best of it ; one who 
 never lets anything interfere with his plea- 
 sures. Some of the fellows, I am told, think 
 it great fun after dinner on winter evenings 
 to sit over the fire and hear the gray-headed 
 yet only middle-aged officer sneer at men 
 and things and discount heroism. Only one 
 of them, I know, has ever seen the inside of 
 Tom's house, though they have all been his 
 guests at club dinners, card parties, and 
 billiards. You never know a man, Horace, 
 until you have lived with him."
 
 COLONEL ERNSTONe's SECRET. 141 
 
 ^^ Or been at sea with him. Uncle." 
 ^' True, that tries a man's temper. And 
 Tom has a temper, mind you." 
 
 ^^ I have never seen the rough side of it." 
 ^' Sir John Norwood, a man who was down 
 here hunting with the Duke, did once. He 
 ventured upon a questionable compliment, 
 touching Tom's daughter, which nearly ended 
 in Sir John's sudden and violent death on 
 the hearth-rug of the Parthenon Club, and was 
 the occasion of a hurried committee-meeting, 
 at which Sir John saw fit to apologise for 
 being nearly half strangled. Th^rese is never 
 mentioned, I am told, at the Parthenon, or at 
 White's, except by young Hallam, the York- 
 shire baronet — your first of September friend. 
 He is as madly in love, I hear, with Th^rese, 
 as I wish you were with Helen Dunstan, 
 though I confess that love is not necessarily 
 a factor in marriage." 
 
 ^'Was Mrs. Ernstone English?" I asked, 
 
 for I had never heard her spoken of, and 
 
 Th^r^se looked more ^4oreign" than myself. 
 
 '' His wife was a youthful flame, quenched
 
 142 A MODERN ULYSSES. , 
 
 by the birth of Th^rese. It was a love-match 
 abroad ; the girl was humble but respectable ; 
 that much I know of the story from Tom's 
 own lips ; she is buried in a Normandy 
 churchyard ; but she is not a subject to be 
 talked of, for Tom's own private reasons. He 
 tells me that Th^rfese has a great wish to 
 visit her mother's grave, and that he is con- 
 tinually trying to bring himself into a frame 
 of mind to comply with her desire ; but that 
 whenever he does walk along the old church- 
 yard to stand by the side of her tomb, with 
 his daughter by his side, he shall realise 
 something of what the martyrs felt who had 
 to travel over red-hot plough-shares. It has 
 gone hard with him, you see, this love as you 
 call it. Let us have none of it, Horace ! 
 Helen Dunstan and an unruffled calm life of 
 friendly intercourse, and a big balance at 
 your banker's, eh?" 
 
 ''Yes, uncle, certainly, in preference to 
 love and red-hot plough-shares anyhow." 
 
 A few days before we went on our travels, 
 Colonel Ernstone and I, we dined at War-
 
 COLONEL ERNSTONE's SECRET. 143 
 
 rington Manor. The party consisted of 
 Helen, Th^rese, my uncle, the vicar, the 
 Liberal Member of Parliament for Bredon 
 (wdth all Peregrine Fox's clever articles he 
 had not been able to return a Tory for 
 that ancient borough), a curate and his 
 mother, and one or two other local people. 
 Susan Dobbs, in the stiff est of black silk 
 dresses, sat near the curate and talked the 
 stiff est of theology to him. I took Helen in 
 to dinner, and we were rather dull, both of 
 us, I don't know why. She looked re- 
 markably handsome, and I wondered if on 
 my return from '^ the grand tour," as my 
 uncle called it, I should ask her to be my wife. 
 During the evening she sang (she had a 
 rich contralto voice) Molloy's pathetic ballad 
 " The Clang of the Wooden Shoon." As 
 the story of the girl whose lover never came 
 back from sea was told, I could not help 
 noticing that Tom Ernstone pressed his 
 daughter's hand almost convulsively. I was 
 sitting near her and had been in communi- 
 cation with her and the Colonel up to the
 
 144 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 very moment that Helen began to sing. I 
 learnt afterwards that my uncle, as well as 
 she and I, noticed the sad and pained ex- 
 pression on his face as the touching words 
 fell in vocal tenderness from the lips of the 
 singer. 
 
 " But they are gone, a weary while, ah me ! 
 And he my own came home no more from sea. 
 The sea looks black, the waves have all a moan, 
 And I am left to sit and dream alone." 
 
 He looked up from the fire for a moment 
 as this vocal wail of sadness, with its touching 
 figure of the broken-hearted woman waiting 
 for him who should never come back, filled 
 the quiet atmosphere of the friendly room. 
 I saw a tear trickle slowly down his cheek. 
 He got up presently, thanked Miss Dunstan 
 with an impresiveness that surprised her, and 
 then turning to my uncle said he hoped he 
 was ready to return to the Cedars. 
 
 ^' So soon ? " asked Helen. 
 
 ^^ Ther^se looks tired," said Ernstone, 
 '^ and she has had a long day." 
 
 When, after a smart drive under the 
 September stars, we reached home, there was
 
 COLONEL EKNSTONE's SECRET. 145 
 
 a cheerful light in the library. Tom Ernstone 
 took his daughter in his arms, kissed her, 
 and bade her good night. When the spirit 
 bottles and pipes and cigars were laid on the 
 table he said, '^ Horace, I want to have a 
 private chat with your uncle before I go to 
 bed, do you mind ? " 
 
 ^^Notl, Colonel," I said. 
 
 " He may tell you all about it if he likes 
 one day ; it involves a lesson that may be 
 useful to you," said the soldier. 
 
 ^' Oh thank you. Colonel, I should be 
 sorry to trespass upon your confidence." 
 
 ^^ There is no fellow whom I would 
 rather have there than you, Horace, my 
 boy," he said, taking my hand. 
 
 My uncle filled his pipe and looked at us 
 with a grave face. Sandy came in and made 
 the grog. I sipped a little to the health of 
 our guest and went to bed. 
 
 It was a strange and sad story which Tom 
 Ernstone told his old friend that night. My 
 uncle did not make me acquainted with it 
 for some time afterwards, but for the sake of 
 
 VOL. I. L
 
 146 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 uniformity of narrative I propose to set forth 
 the episode in this place, relegating the con- 
 fession to the succeeding chapter.
 
 147 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE MYSTERY OF THERESE ERNSTONE. 
 
 '^ Laying his hand affectionately on my 
 shoulder," said my uncle, when afterwards 
 narrating the incident to me in very elo- 
 quent detail, 
 
 '^ ^ Old fellow,' " he said, '' ' 1 have de- 
 ceived you. I want to put myself right 
 with you. I have not discouraged Sir Chris- 
 tojDher Hallam's attentions to Therese, be- 
 cause I could see that the moment they met 
 it was a mutual case of love at first sight. I 
 wish her to marry the man she likes, who- 
 ever he is ; and Hallam is a good match. 
 But as an honourable man I must tell him 
 some facts about Therese, which I have not 
 even told you. Whatever comes of it he shall 
 know. I will begin my penance with you, 
 Dick." 
 
 l2
 
 148 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 *^ He took up the poker and stirred the 
 fire, not that it required stirring, but as if he 
 were arranging his thoughts ; and he looked 
 round at me as he laid his unlighted cigar 
 upon the table. 
 
 '^ I have known army men who have seen 
 him, at the head of his cavalry, ride straight 
 
 up to an enemy's guns and . But that 
 
 is not the question. To the world he is a 
 hard-hearted cynic ; but bitter epigram and 
 an occasional sneer at sentiment represent 
 the cloak which hides a tender heart and 
 a lifelong regret. 
 
 " ' That song ! I saw you noticed my 
 emotion,' he said, as he sat down again, 
 looking into the fire. ' I have often felt 
 that music has the power to lead one back 
 to the past, and revive events that one 
 tries to forget. Fate or Providence must 
 have moved Miss Dunstan to sing that song 
 to-night : — 
 
 " Oh ! the clang of the wooden shoon ; 
 Oh ! the dance and the merry tune ! 
 Happy sound of a bygone day, 
 It rings in my heart for aye I '
 
 THE MYSTERY OF THERESE ERNSTONE. 149 
 
 My God ! I could see the dear suffering girl 
 in her Normandy cap and sabots, sitting 
 alone on that old wooden pier, waiting, 
 waiting, with the sound of the merry tune 
 turned to a dirge in her heart ! ' 
 
 ^' He swept his bony hand over his eyes 
 and spoke as if he had forgotten me. 
 
 '' 'My dear friend,' he went on, after a 
 pause, ^ I want to confess. Let me show 
 you the picture that song showed me, the 
 picture which it still shows me in the fire. 
 An old Normandy pier. A soft summer 
 night. An English yacht moored at the 
 jetty. A company of villagers regaled by 
 Lord Templer, the owner ; myself his com- 
 panion. A fiddler pressed into the service. 
 My partner as lovely a girl as the eyes of a 
 villain ever rested on ; an olive complexion, 
 and the head of a Normandy aristocrat on 
 the shoulders of a peasant ; the strength of a 
 fishwoman, with the grace of an Egyptian 
 water-carrier. She was the most perfect 
 type of Norman beauty that mind of man 
 can imagine or brain of poet invent. I was
 
 150 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 a young reckless fellow on a yachting cruise, 
 putting in at that little fishing station for 
 letters. My despatches came within twenty- 
 four hours. I was ordered to join my troop 
 in India at once. Lord Templer sailed the 
 next day, leaving me to go on to Paris and 
 London for outfit and other necessaries. I did 
 not go on to Paris that day nor the next ; I 
 stayed to make love to Julie. I called it 
 making love. She thought it was love, poor 
 little Normandy maiden ! The next night 
 there was a wedding in the village ; a friend 
 of Julie's was married to an Etretat fisher- 
 man. I went to the evening party. We 
 danced until morning. The clang of the 
 wooden shoon and the merry laughter of 
 young and old came back to me last night 
 like a blight as that song with its sad 
 merriment took hold of my heart and 
 memory. I stayed in the village for two 
 weeks. It was a happy dream, but the dream 
 of a fiend who had stolen into paradise. I 
 promised to return. I never meant to do so. 
 Her hot tears fell on|]] my hand at parting.
 
 THE MYSTERY OF THERESE ERNSTONE. 151 
 
 I went to India. Don't you remember you 
 used to ask what ailed me, why I had 
 the blues, why I was often half mad, 
 why I was reckless — why I was odd, and 
 strange, and eccentric ? Well it was Julie. 
 I discovered that I loved her. She was 
 in my mind always. I hated other women. 
 I shunned intrigues that some of the 
 fellows of Ours would have given any- 
 thing to be in. I was in love. I wrote to 
 her. No reply ever came. Perhaps she 
 could not write. Perhaps her letters mis- 
 carried ; for we were worried about from 
 post to post, as you know. Her face, her 
 black eyes, her pouting lips, her wooden 
 shoes — by the Lord, from head to foot the 
 pretty little woman sank deep into my heart! 
 She was the one creature in all the world of 
 whom I was continually thinking; always 
 with a vow to go back to her, and to do her 
 the justice that my selfish love had only 
 prompted when I was far away from her.' 
 
 '' He paused, rose from his chair, and 
 walked about the room. I encouraged him 
 with some friendly words.
 
 152 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 *^ ' Five years had gone when I stood 
 once more on the Normandy jetty. The 
 sleepy old fishing-smacks were there, the 
 peasant women in their wooden shoes, the 
 sailors and fishermen, the flapping sails, the 
 sea creeping lazily along the coast. Where 
 was Julie ? Our hot work and my bruised 
 heart had changed me out of knowledge. I 
 looked for Julie. I inquired for Julie. 
 People shook their heads. At last an old 
 woman, as she sat knitting in the sun, told 
 me how five years ago a yacht had anchored 
 there ; how the noble English had generously 
 treated the village ; how the brutal English 
 had ruined Julie Perreyve, the prettiest girl 
 on all the coast; how she had trusted the 
 English honour, how she had waited for 
 Milord's return, how she had sat on the 
 jetty's edge looking out to sea, how at every 
 village dance and festival she had sat a 
 silent spectator, how she had faded out — 
 how she had died ! ' " 
 
 '^ My old friend's voice trembled with 
 emotion, but he poked the fire again ; and
 
 THE MYSTERY OF THERESE ERNSTONE. 153 
 
 looking into the smouldering embers he went 
 on with the story that had burnt its memory 
 into his heart. 
 
 ^^ ^ No Indian bullet could have hit me so 
 hard and so cruelly as that story of Julie's 
 sorrow and death. I did not speak for some 
 time. Then I put money into the old woman's 
 hand. ^ Take me to the place in «which they 
 have buried her,' I said. I looked down 
 upon the poor little green mound and the 
 wooden cross. It seemed as if my heart 
 split in two.' " 
 
 '^ * God help you, my poor dear friend !' 
 I said, and took his hand in mine. 
 
 ^^ ^ You may well say so,' he answered, 
 ^ you may well. But there is a streak of 
 light in the tragedy. I went back to the 
 old dame's cottage. I sat down to talk to 
 her of Julie. I wanted to learn everything 
 about her. It was now a welcome penance 
 to hear of her devotion, her sorrow, her 
 martyrdom. A clatter of wooden shoes 
 rattled across the floor of the adjoining room. 
 Then a childish voice called out/ Grand' mere J
 
 154 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 The next moment a fairy in wooden shoes 
 came bounding in, an infant rising five. The 
 old woman took her up and kissed her. 
 * This is her child, ' she said, turning to me. 
 ^ Whose *^' I asked with a joyous fearlessness. 
 ' Julie's,' she said. ' We call her Th^rese, 
 the little English lady.' ^ My child ! ' I said, 
 trembling like a woman, ^ my child ! ' and 
 even that hard Normandy grandmother pitied 
 me when she guessed how much I had suf- 
 fered." 
 
 ^' He sighed, and then facing me said— 
 
 ^^ ' That is the bar sinister on the es- 
 cutcheon of Th^rese Ernstone. I am going 
 to confess the blot to Christopher Hallam. 
 What will he say ? What will he do ?' 
 
 " ' Admire and love you, as I do, for 
 your big heart, your manliness, and your 
 honour,' I said. 
 
 '' ^ Ah, I don't know about the honour, 
 my friend, but repentance and the desire and 
 intention to atone for a wrong are good. 
 Hallam must make me a solemn promise 
 that whatever happens he will never let
 
 THE MYSTERY OF THERESE ERNSTONE. 155 
 
 Th^rese know what I shall tell liim. He 
 has no father nor mother to consult. He is 
 master of himself. What will he do ?'" 
 
 The question must be left for Sir Chris- 
 topher Hallam's reply, which will present 
 itself, in due course, for future consideration. 
 
 END OF BOOK I.
 
 BOOK II. 
 
 Farewell ! if ever fondest prayer 
 
 For other^s weal availed on high, 
 Mine will not all be lost in air. 
 
 But waft thy name beyond the sky. 
 ^Twere vain to speak, to iveep, to sigh : 
 
 Oh ! more than tears of blood can tell, 
 When wrung from guilfs expiring eye, 
 
 Are in the word — Farewell ! Farewell ! 
 
 These lips are mute, these eyes are dry ; 
 
 But in my heart and in my brain 
 Awake the pangs that pass not by, 
 
 The thought that ne'er shall sleep again. 
 My soul nor deigns nor dares complain, 
 
 Though grief and passion there rebel : 
 I only know we loved in vain — 
 
 / only feel — Farewell ! Farewell ! — 
 
 Lord Byron.
 
 159 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 By the light of the revelation of Colonel 
 Ernstone's secret, I afterwards read his treat- 
 ment of me on the occasion of a confession 
 which I made to him. The reader of these 
 reminiscences will have an advantage over 
 me, in this respect, at the moment of the 
 occurrences I am about to relate. 
 
 We had lounged through Italy, and had 
 rested at the village of Baveno, where Ern- 
 stone had left me to visit Sir Christopher 
 Hallam at Milan on a matter of business, 
 with an arrangement between us that he 
 would return within a fortnight. He had 
 hardly left me when I made a delightful dis- 
 covery near the dream-like shores of Lago 
 Maggiore.
 
 160 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 To see her was to love her. I fell before 
 her first glance. 
 
 '* Who is she ? " I asked an Italian 
 peasant. 
 
 '^ Ah ! the beautiful stranger ! " he said, 
 looking towards the villa that lay at a dis- 
 tance from the road amidst the clustering 
 woods. 
 
 Nobody knew her. She had bought the 
 villa, and had lived there for several months 
 without a visitor. Had she servants ? Oh, 
 yes, and an old lady sometimes assisted 
 Father Gabriello to distribute alms for her 
 among the poor. What country was she ? 
 French, perhaps. They could not say. 
 German, possibly, or English? She spoke 
 Italian with a foreign accent. Her com- 
 plexion was fair and her hair a golden-brown. 
 There were pictures of the Madonna not 
 unlike her in Italian churches. Perhaps she 
 was a Venetian. They could not tell. It 
 was not probable she was English, and she 
 was too beautifully fair to be French. 
 
 I had twice met her in byways leading
 
 calypso's island. 161 
 
 from the lake. She was sitting by the side 
 of an old woman. They were in a carriage 
 drawn by a pair of horses and driven by a 
 French coachman. I stood to gaze after her, 
 not out of impertinent curiosity, but trans- 
 fixed with an admiration that overpowered 
 me. I realised something of the sensations 
 of Ulysses bound to the mast in presence of 
 the Syrens. My soul was on fire. I think 
 at that moment I would have sold it to the 
 fiend, as Faust did at the sight of Marguerite. 
 One day she turned her head to look at 
 me. I could not be mistaken. Not only to 
 look at me, but to smile upon me. I fol- 
 lowed her carriage on foot, keeping it in 
 view for some time. I think she ordered the 
 coachman to drive slowly. Presently, how- 
 ever, she disappeared. The surrounding 
 forest closed in upon her. She was gone. 
 In the distance the villa, where I understood 
 she lived, caught the last rays of the sun on 
 traceried tower and window. A brook 
 came bounding out of the grounds. It sang 
 praises of her beauty in response to my own 
 
 VOL. I. M
 
 162 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 ecstacy. Then it wound round in a gentle 
 curve and turned again as if to encompass 
 the park-like forest that shut her from me. 
 I lay upon its banks, I walked among the 
 boulders in its bed, I followed its course like 
 a man enchanted. 
 
 The next day I returned to the point 
 where I left it, and continued winding along 
 the track of it, and hoping that I might 
 meet the syren of the grove which it watered. 
 The little estate in which the villa stood 
 was an island ; and when, immediately on 
 this discovery, my mind went rambling back 
 to Ulysses, I rebuked the thought that 
 entitled it Calypso's Island. 
 
 This goddess of the villa was a Diana 
 rather than a Calypso; but, whatever she 
 might be, I was her slave. Ah, if the lady 
 of Warrington Manor had only inspired me 
 with such mad passion as this ! Then, instead 
 of emulating the heroic lovers in old Burton's 
 chronicles, might I not have fulfilled the am- 
 bition of the master of the Cedars, and lived 
 in uninterrupted felicity and increasing hap-
 
 calypso's island. 163 
 
 piness, like ^' Seneca with his Paulina, 
 Orpheus with Eurydice, Arria with Psetus, 
 Artemnisa with Mausoleus, and Rubenius 
 Celea with his lovely Ennea." 
 
 My passion for this beautiful stranger, to 
 whom I had not even spoken, burned with all 
 the sudden fury and persistent flame that, ac- 
 cording to Burton, belongs to ^'love melan- 
 choly.'' And yet, under the test of the noblest 
 aspirations of true love, it did not, as Burton 
 depicts the passion, sacrifice on ^Hhe altar of 
 the implacable deity " either the fear of Grod 
 or man, nor outrage ^^all laws human and 
 divine ;" but, ^' like the forked lightning of the 
 angry gods," it laid waste for years a career 
 and a disposition, where the beneficent hand 
 of time is only now beginning to cultivate the 
 buds and blossoms of a new ambition. 
 
 I did meet her, and by that very stream, 
 and I spoke to her, and she to me, her voice 
 softening as she did so, as voices soften in 
 conversation with those they love. She had 
 seen me somewhere before, she said. No, 
 she was not mistaken. I knew that I had 
 M 2
 
 164 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 only seen her now for the first time. Why- 
 was I so positive ? Because I had only lived 
 since I had seen her. Her eyes fell, shadow- 
 ing her cheek with long drooping lashes. She 
 was not displeased. I could see the corners of 
 her mouth dimple with satisfaction. Nothing 
 would have restrained me, not even her scorn. 
 I seized her hand. She did not withdraw it. 
 I covered it with kisses. I was mad. I told 
 her that I loved her. If she were to call her 
 people and have me put upon the rack, I told 
 her I should say the same. She pressed my 
 hand, and looked into my eyes. One only 
 feels the hot mad delight of passion once. 
 But it is something gained in life to recall it, 
 whatever its associations may be. 
 
 She was a dream of loveliness. Her hand 
 was made to give her soul away, so soft and 
 tender was it, so lingering in its touch. 
 Her eyes were steadfast too. They were a 
 blue-grey, of liquid depth, and when they 
 rested on mine I had no thoughts that were 
 not wholly hers. Tall and graceful, she had 
 the bust of a Clytie and the head of a Ceres,
 
 calypso's island. 165 
 
 '^rich-haired." A thin grey merino with a 
 broad pink sash about her waist, she carried 
 a great sunshade lined with a sea-shell pink 
 silk and covered with old point lace. When 
 she smiled her face was illuminated with a 
 genial warmth. She was one of those 
 lovely creations that pervade their surround- 
 ing atmospheres, like the orchids in the 
 tree-tops of a lowland forest near the equator, 
 the rhododendrons of American woods, or 
 the lilies of an English valley. You felt her 
 presence even if you saw her not. Her 
 loveliness made a halo for itself. She ap- 
 peared to me to be the centre of every spot 
 upon which her beauty shone, completing a 
 picture Nature might have left unfinished 
 that she should adorn it. The personification 
 of grace and symmetry, she was to me the 
 type of all that is pure, virtuous, and mag- 
 nanimous. In my fancy she was worthy of the 
 praises which Ossian lavished upon Darthula. 
 Her beauty was, indeed, entrancing beyond 
 that of Erin's maid, reflecting as it did the 
 sunny warmth of a loving nature. Clothed
 
 166 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 with the purity of the last of Colla's race, she 
 was to me not less fascinating than the more 
 classic goddess of a better-known mythology, 
 the celestial nymph ''with every beauty 
 crowned." 
 
 Need I say more to make the reader 
 understand that I was madly in love, and 
 that the woman of my adoration was '' beau- 
 tiful beyond compare ? '' I was utterly un- 
 sophisticated in the seductiveness of the mad 
 passion. No reason had hitherto presented 
 itself in my life to exercise the caution that 
 Southey urges upon youth, how they advance 
 into the dangerous world. Only our duty can, 
 he says, conduct us safely. '' Our passions 
 are seducers ; but of all the strongest Love." 
 There was no ordinary passion either in 
 the poetic or m the physical sense in my 
 love ; it was an uncontrolled and uncon- 
 trollable desire to sit at the feet of this 
 goddess of the Italian woods, to be near her, 
 to hear her speak, to have no other ambition 
 than her sweet companionship. 
 
 Looking back upon this youthful dream,
 
 calypso's island. 167 
 
 this, on my part, emulative blissf ulness of the 
 early days of Celadon and his Amelia, I 
 recall the pathetic glances that now and then 
 fell from the great eloquent eyes of my first 
 love ; I recall the furtive sigh, the tender 
 regretful eloquence of wayward words, 
 which in those past days had no meaning 
 for me except as belonging to a generous 
 loving kindness conferred upon me. It never 
 entered my arrogant thoughts that any 
 other mortal had been blessed with her elo- 
 quent speech, her sympathetic glances. For 
 me the world had just begun, and the vanity 
 of this first fair encounter swept my thoughts 
 clear of yesterdays. 
 
 On that next day, to which I just now 
 referred, she motioned me to a seat beside 
 her, a rustic couch covered with dainty dra- 
 peries, on the margin of the villa's garden, 
 and close by the rivulet which encircled the 
 foliated domain. 
 
 '' Sit," she said, '' and let us talk." 
 Her hand rested accidentally near 
 mine. Overcome with my boyish emotions.
 
 168 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 and nerved by a strange courage, I seized it, 
 and confessed the love with which she had 
 inspired me. 
 
 '^ But you have only seen me for the first 
 time within the week," she answered. 
 
 '' I loved you at first sight," I said. 
 
 " Truly," she answered, '' and have you 
 not made the same confession to half a hun- 
 dred women before?" 
 
 The coolness of the retort chilled me for 
 a moment; but before I could reply she 
 amended her answer. 
 
 '^ Your words are sincere, I do quite be- 
 lieve," she said. '^ You have not seen the 
 world." 
 
 ^^ Indeed I have," I answered, ^^and I 
 know there is no woman in it so lonely, so 
 kind as you." 
 
 She allowed her hand to remain in mine. 
 It was a soft, plump, white hand. 
 
 *^ You are an Englishman?" she asked, 
 turning her face towards me. 
 
 It was a circular seat upon which we sat, 
 so that, although we were side by side, we
 
 calypso's island. 169 
 
 almost faced each other, and I could note the 
 expression of her eyes, and the gentle parting 
 of her lips. 
 
 ^' Yes," I said, ^' that is, I am English 
 born, but my father, heaven rest him, was 
 of French descent." 
 
 '^ And I am your first love? Was there 
 no girl-love in your very youthful days?" 
 
 '' None," I said, pressing her hand. 
 
 " No tiny thing in short frocks that you 
 remember to-day with pleasure or regret?" 
 
 *^ My boyish days belong to the world of 
 regrets," I answered. 
 
 '' You have had sorrows, then?" 
 
 ^^Yes." 
 
 So long as her soft hand lay in mine I 
 was content to sit and answer her questions 
 in a vague impassive way ; though my vanity 
 was flattered by the interest she evinced in me. 
 
 '^ Great sorrows ? You had a father and 
 mother who loved you ? " 
 
 '' A father and mother? Yes. My mother 
 would have loved me, had she dared. My 
 father loved me, and died."
 
 170 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 '^ As dies all human love," she said. 
 
 '^We will make an exception to that 
 sorrowful rule/' I said, '4f you shall deign 
 to give your love to me." 
 
 The ardency of this first inspiration of 
 passion made me bold, and my courage was 
 stimulated by the continued possession of 
 her hand. 
 
 ^' The world is full of deceit and sad- 
 ness," she said. 
 
 ^' We will make a world of our own, 
 dedicated to love," I said. 
 
 ^^You talk as if the repartee of professed 
 courtship were easy to you," she said; 
 and before I could respond to this reflection 
 on my sincerity (for I never dreamed of 
 taking it as a confession of experience) she 
 took up the thread of her previous reference 
 to my early life. 
 
 *^In what part of the great world did 
 you spend your youth ? " 
 
 ^^ At Scarsdale, in Derbyshire." 
 
 ^^ Derbyshire ! Ah, yes. A very pictur- 
 esque county, is it not ? "
 
 calypso's island. 171 
 
 a Very." 
 
 ^^AndScarsdale?" 
 
 ^' I do not like it." 
 
 uwhy?" 
 
 ^' Chiefly because it is associated in my 
 memory with sad events, a somewhat melan- 
 choly childhood, and a funeral that well-nigh 
 broke my heart." 
 
 ^' Your father's?" 
 
 ^^Yes." 
 
 ^' But 3^our mother lives ? " 
 
 ^'Yes; though I have never seen her 
 since I left Scarsdale for ever." 
 
 She waited for me to continue. 
 
 '^I like to hear you talk of your boy- 
 hood,'' she said. ^^ Why did you leave Scars- 
 dale ? And why for ever ? " 
 
 '^ I was unhappy. My mother married 
 again. Her husband hated me and I him. 
 He poisoned my mother's mind against 
 me." 
 
 '^ But before that time," she said, ^^ when 
 your father lived, were you not happy 
 then?"
 
 172 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 '' Oh yes, I think so." 
 
 '' You had companions ? " 
 
 '^No." 
 
 '^ Not some village girl, some little neigh- 
 bour, the memory of whose voice goes with 
 you through life, a something that might be 
 part of a dream, not all sadness ?" 
 
 I hesitated. Connie Gardner occurred to 
 me; but the conceit of my love for this 
 splendid woman checked me. Love may be 
 that overwhelming passion the poets claim, 
 but it is diplomatic in spite of all. The de- 
 sire to impress the object of your affections 
 is so prominent a factor in your intercourse 
 with her, that you are always sufficiently 
 self-conscious to make the best of yourself. 
 Your position, your antecedents, your pros- 
 pects, your family and connections. Instinct, 
 under the guidance of this human vanity, 
 checked my mention of a mere waif and stray 
 of Scarsdale, whose touching '^ Good-bye ! " 
 came back to me with pathetic force under 
 the pressure of Calypso-Darthula's inquiries. 
 
 '^ I had no girl companions," I said, fenc-
 
 calypso's island. 173 
 
 ing with the question, *^ nor any boy friends 
 for that matter. My childhood was lonely. 
 My father being French in speech and man- 
 ner was made a reproach to me by the 
 ignorant youth of Scarsdale. I remember 
 even now, with bitterness, the persecutions 
 which I endured at the hands of one boy- 
 monster named Barnes, who harassed me 
 continually. The very elegancies of the 
 home-life of my father's house offended both 
 young and old. He was a musician and an 
 artist ; I suspect the only bit of pure art 
 atmosphere to be found in Scarsdale was 
 at Oakfield House, where I lived." 
 
 " An oasis in a desert of ignorance," she 
 said, " and you have cherished these memo- 
 ries?" 
 
 « Yes." 
 
 '' Are you an artist, then ? " 
 
 " Not by profession." 
 
 " An amateur ? " 
 
 " I have some knowledge of music." 
 
 " You sing ? "
 
 174 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 '' A little." 
 
 " You are an instrumentalist ? " 
 
 '' I know enough to regret that I know so 
 little." 
 
 " You left Scarsdale to go to College, no 
 doubt?" 
 
 " No, to live with my uncle." 
 
 '' And you are travelling for your 
 pleasure ? " 
 
 " For pleasure and experience ; my last 
 excursion prior to settling down in London to 
 study for the Bar — at least so it is arranged." 
 
 *' You know London, then ? " 
 
 '' No." 
 
 " You have been there often ? " 
 
 '^ Only a few times, but always en route 
 to the continent." 
 
 " You have not lived in town — not even 
 spent a season there ? " 
 
 "No ; my uncle has strange views about 
 London ; a city for men, not for boys, he 
 always says. He did not exactly forbid me 
 staying in London, but he talked against
 
 calypso's island. 175 
 
 it ; and, as he gave me opportunities to visit 
 all the world besides, I should have been 
 ungrateful to disobey him." 
 
 '^ Then you know Paris, Milan, Vienna, 
 Berlin, perhaps?" 
 
 ''Yes; and nearly all the other great 
 European capitals, and some of the Asiatic 
 cities also." 
 
 " A great traveller, and so young ? " she 
 said. 
 
 " Not so very young," I said, that diplo- 
 matic instinct before mentioned coming to 
 my aid ; for the possibility of an in- 
 equality in our ages occurred to me as a 
 possible impediment in regard to her answer, 
 when I should ask her to be my partner in 
 those sweet bonds of matrimony that should 
 make her mine and me hers for ever. 
 
 It did not occur to me that for less self- 
 ish purposes in the days of my boyhood I 
 had challenged Connie Gardner's age and she 
 mine ; for, as I said before, I strove rather 
 to shut out these memories than to encourage 
 them in presence of this splendid creature,
 
 176 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 who had already condescended so much in 
 her notice of me that I dared not challenge 
 the sincerity of her interest in me by the ex- 
 hibition of any latent feeling for so insigni- 
 ficant a person as the runaway grandchild of 
 Laudanum Nanny. 
 
 ^' And since those days of Scarsdale you 
 have found the world a merry place ?" she 
 said. 
 
 '^I never dreamed there could be so 
 much happiness in it until now." 
 
 '^ Paris is as good a tutor, I fancy, in 
 the small change of so-called love-making 
 as London," she said, withdrawing her 
 hand from mine and rising to her feet. 
 
 '^ You do not doubt the sincerity of my 
 love ! " I exclaimed, and my heart seemed to 
 stop with a sudden anxiety. 
 
 ^' I have lived in London,'' she said, 
 ^' and in Paris also, and I know the ring of 
 the coin which passes current for the true 
 lover's gold." 
 
 As she spoke she beckoned to the old 
 woman in the distance. The wrinkled but
 
 calypso's island. 177 
 
 stately dame came towards us. I felt for a 
 moment as if a great disaster had befallen 
 me. 
 
 ^^ Madame Fridoline," she said. 
 
 '^ Madame," responded the ancient dame. 
 
 ** Mr. Horace Durand will call at the 
 villa to-morrow, and it is my pleasure that 
 you announce him to me the moment he 
 arrives." 
 
 The dame curtseyed, Madame held out 
 her hand, I kissed it respectfully ; and the 
 next moment I was alone with my reflections 
 and the music of the bubbling brook, now 
 somewhat out of tune, yet quite in harmony 
 with the agitation of my mind. 
 
 VOL. T. N
 
 178 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 OUTSIDE THE GROTTO, AND ADVISED NOT 
 TO ENTER THERE. 
 
 '* How did she know my name ? " I asked 
 myself twenty times as I retraced my steps 
 to the little inn, where I remained to await 
 Colonel Ernstone's return. I do not remem- 
 ber to have mentioned it ; she might have 
 learnt it at the inn ; but of course she would 
 not have taken the trouble to inquire, and 
 yet she spoke it as familiarly as if she had 
 known it always! ^^And why did her 
 pleasant manner change so abruptly ? " 
 
 '' Who is the lady that lives at the villa?" 
 I asked of the landlord at the inn, who sat
 
 OUTSIDE THE GROTTO. 179 
 
 smoking beneath his vine and fig-tree in the 
 sun. 
 
 He did not know. 
 '^ She is English, eh ? " 
 ^'The English are a great nation," he said. 
 ^'Will you find out for me, perhaps at 
 the post-office, her name and quality." 
 
 ^'Eh, Dio!" he said, ^^ the Signora of 
 the villa would have me shot for such 
 inquisiti veness . ' ' 
 
 ^^ Has she given orders," I asked, ^^ for 
 the maintenance of an incognito, then ?'' 
 
 Madame had given no orders, he answered, 
 but she was kindness itself. Her money 
 alleviated the need of all the district. She 
 was a saint in disguise. When first she 
 came there she was sick. Father Gabriello 
 (at whose name he bowed and crossed him- 
 self) had given her religious consolation. 
 Since then his Church of the Visitation had 
 been adorned in many ways by the gifts of 
 the good Signora. He pointed to a tiny 
 church, nestling on the hill-side, as he spoke. 
 N 2
 
 180 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 It was not necessary that he should con- 
 firm my opinion of her goodness. But why- 
 was she surrounded with mystery ? 
 
 While I was talking with the cautious 
 master of the inn, the priest, Father Gabriello 
 himself, came up to eat his daily fare of soup, 
 birds, and maccaroni, to drink his bottle of 
 wine, and smoke his cigarette. 
 
 I responded to his genial salutation and 
 begged to be allowed to sit at table with 
 him in the common room of the inn. 
 
 Though I despised myself for trying to 
 penetrate what she evidently desired to 
 keep a secret, I could not help talking of 
 the beautiful lady of the villa. When Father 
 Gabriello' s courtly manners towards me had 
 mellowed still more under the effect of the 
 rich white wine, which had been forthcom- 
 ing under special pressure (a concession to 
 influence and money combined) I opened the 
 ball. 
 
 ^* You know Madame, the lady of the 
 villa yonder?" I said, indicating with a nod 
 the direction of the house in the woods.
 
 OUTSIDE THE GROTTO. 181 
 
 '^ She has honoured me much," he 
 answered. 
 
 ^' An English lady ? " I remarked. 
 
 ^^ The Church is universal; it has no 
 nationality. Are you one of her sons ? " 
 
 '^ I am a Protestant," I said. 
 
 ^^It is a great world," responded the 
 priest. 
 
 '^ Permit me to say that I have a sincere 
 resj)ect for the more ancient Church, and 
 tliat I admire the devotion of its priest- 
 hood." 
 
 Father Gabriello bowed. 
 
 '' You are English ? " he said. ^^ I enter- 
 tain the highest sentiments of admiration for 
 your nation. I have lived in England." 
 
 '^ Indeed ! I might have guessed it by 
 the way in which you speak the language." 
 
 *^ You are complimentary. I held a cur^ 
 in an English city for many years." 
 
 ^* May I ask what city ? " 
 
 ^^ Worcester, the last to stand out against 
 the arch-fiend Cromwell." 
 
 '^ You surprise me ! "
 
 182 A MODERN O'LYSSES. 
 
 u^liy?" 
 
 '' Because my home is in that county, 
 not more than a score of miles from the 
 faithful city, as they love to call it." 
 
 '^ Ah, Dio mio ! " he exclaimed, ''it is 
 not a great world, it is a small one." 
 
 '' How long is it since you left Worces- 
 ter?" 
 
 " Five years." 
 
 '' Then perhaps you may have met my 
 uncle, Mr. Richard Grantley ? " 
 
 ''Of The Cedars, near Breedon?" he 
 asked, " Dick Grantley ? " 
 
 " The same," I said. 
 
 *' Oh yes ; I met him at Lord Danmere's 
 at dinner, twice ; Lord Danmere, you know, 
 is a great Tory and a strict Catholic. Your 
 uncle, if I remember rightly, is the one 
 and not the other." 
 
 "True true," I said; "but a noble, 
 upright, true, honourable gentleman ! " 
 
 "No doubt, no doubt; I have heard 
 Lord Danmere say so." 
 
 " Father Gabriello, it gives me more
 
 OUTSIDE THE GROTTO. 183 
 
 pleasure than I can put into words to meet 
 you !" I said. 
 
 ^^ Since yoii have learnt that I know your 
 uncle?" he replied, with a merry twinkle 
 in his dark brown eyes. 
 
 ^^ Oh, yes, and for your own sake too,'' 
 I said, quickly. '^ I drink to your health," 
 I said ; *^to our better acquaintance, and I 
 hope to our ultimate friendship ! " 
 
 ^^ It is well said, sir; I gladly respond, 
 and beg that we may pledge the name of 
 Squire Grantley in a mutual toast." 
 
 We clanked our glasses together and 
 drank to the dear old gentleman, whose 
 generosity enabled me to do this honour, in 
 a foreign country, to his name and reputa- 
 tion. 
 
 '' And now since we know each other so 
 well," I said, '^ will you pardon me for say- 
 ing that if I were of the same faith as Lord 
 Danmere I should just now be not only 
 anxious to confess to you, but to seek your 
 advice." 
 
 '^ You may do so without being received
 
 184 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 into the Church, and probably in your 
 present case you may perhaps obtain worldly 
 advice suitable to your condition." 
 
 ^^ I do not understand," I said. 
 
 '^ I saw you to-day sitting by the side of 
 our beautiful guest of Baveno, the Lady of 
 the villa." 
 
 ** Then you have divined half of what I 
 would confess." 
 
 '^ You do not ask how I saw you and 
 why I did not present myself to the Signora, 
 though the Villa Verona is open house to 
 me. I am Madame's almoner and I am also 
 her confessor." 
 
 *' I love her ! " I exclaimed, rising from 
 the table and pacing the room. 
 
 *' She is a lovable woman." 
 
 '^ I would marry her." 
 
 ^* I hope you will not." 
 
 ^^Why?" 
 
 '^ She has resolved to live in Italy; you 
 would take her to England." 
 
 *' I would live wherever she desired." 
 
 ^'She is devoted to the Church; jon
 
 OUTSIDE THE GROTTO. 185 
 
 would control her disposition. She is rich ; 
 the Church is poor ; you would not endow 
 our charities with her money. You see I 
 am frank." 
 
 ^^I would not touch her money; she 
 should do whatever she pleased with it." 
 
 ^' How then would you live; you have 
 no money ?" 
 
 ^* I have a little, I should earn more." 
 
 ^'How?" 
 
 ^' By my profession." 
 
 ^' What profession ?" 
 
 '' The law." 
 
 ^^ Have you studied the law?" 
 
 '^ Not yet. I could obtain an opening in 
 journalism and authorship." 
 
 '^ You talk wildly and without thought. 
 What would your uncle say to your marry- 
 ing out of your faith ?" 
 
 ^^ He would not object." 
 
 '^ I think he would, and you owe it to 
 him to ask his permission." 
 
 ^^ I would ask it."
 
 186 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 ^af he refused?" 
 
 '' It would kill me." 
 
 '^ What if she refused?" 
 
 ^^ Judge for yourself; all my hopes in 
 life would be gone. I am talking wildly, I 
 admit, madly if you like ; but I am sincere 
 in all I say, and I have courage enough to 
 face every possible difficulty that an unkind 
 fate could lay in my path, fortified with her 
 encouragement and companionship." 
 
 *' A young man should marry in his own 
 circle ; he should take a wife from among 
 his own people, one whom he knows, whose 
 home life he has seen, whose family is 
 familiar with his own. You seek my advice. 
 Leave Baveno at once. Travel far and 
 quickly, and believe that I advise you for 
 your good." 
 
 He laid his hand upon my shoulder in a 
 fatherly way as he spoke. 
 
 '^ A stranger whom you have only known 
 for a few days, a lady who is at least ten 
 years your senior, you cannot afford to give
 
 OUTSIDE THE GROTTO. 187 
 
 up the ambition of a life just commencing 
 for the satisfaction of such a sudden fancy — 
 perhaps worse, mere transient passion." 
 
 ^^ She has invited me to call to-morrow," 
 I said, mentally staggering under the priest's 
 advice. 
 
 '^ It is to tell you, though in more gentle 
 language, what I tell you now, I feel assured ; 
 save her the pain of it, and show, that in 
 asking for good advice you know how to 
 appreciate it." 
 
 ^^ Show a starving man an orchard of ripe 
 autumn fruit, and tell him it is best he should 
 not touch it," I said, impatiently. 
 
 ^^ He refuses," responded the priest, ^^ and 
 lives to discover the dead-sea apple that turns 
 to ashes on the lips." 
 
 '' Pardon me," I said, making a great 
 effort to control myself, '' we will talk no 
 more of this ; I thank you very much for 
 advice that is no doubt well meant." 
 
 ^^It is hard to bear; whether you act 
 upon it or not, pray count me among your 
 friends, and remember that he is not always
 
 1 88 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 the best doctor who leaves the wound un- 
 probed, and whose remedies are pleasantest 
 to the taste." 
 
 How long the night was, how slow the 
 weary hours, that lay between the time when 
 I might once more see the woman who had 
 entranced me ! The sun had set, and the 
 moon had risen before Father Gabriello 
 and I parted. The last glories of the sun 
 were reflected in the adjacent lake, visible 
 from the window of my little sitting-room. 
 A cool breeze, laden with delicious aromatic 
 scents, stirred the palms that half filled the 
 shaded balcony. Distant bells chimed the 
 '' Ave Maria." The musical plash of oars 
 gave life to the stillness below me. And T 
 thought of Calypso's island, turning hot and 
 cold as I did so ; for it seemed as if the scene 
 before me half realised the celestial land of 
 the Odyssey. 
 
 Without the grot a various sylvan scene 
 Appear'd around, and groves of living green ; 
 Poplars and elders ever quivering play'd, 
 And nodding cypress form'd a fragrant shade.
 
 OUTSIDE THE GROTTO. 189 
 
 Four limpid fountains from the clefts distil ; 
 And every fountain pours a several rill, 
 In mazy windings wandering down the hill ; 
 "Where bloomy meads with vivid greens are crown'd, 
 And glowing violets throw their odour round. 
 
 I encouraged my heated imagination into 
 a half crazy hope that I was indeed about to 
 repeat one of the Ulyssean adventures, and I 
 flattered myself, that, should the lady in this 
 case desire to keep me captive, there was no 
 Jove who could command my release. It 
 might have been different had not the muddy 
 Mercury, who brought to the Breedon valley 
 the news of the fall of Sedan, not so rudely 
 interrupted a conversation that was gradually 
 leading up to a serious proposal and a pledge ! 
 But for the battle of Sedan, I should have 
 left Breedon engaged to Helen Dunstan, and 
 then it would have been my duty to have re- 
 sisted the goddess of the Villa Verona ; and, 
 had she proved as self-sacrificing as Calypso 
 herself, I trust I should have remained more 
 faithful to my vows than Ulysses was, as 
 touching his adored Penelope. 
 
 Heaven forgive me for writing in this
 
 190 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 strain of the woman whom I loved so well ! It 
 arises out of no callousness, believe me, but 
 is the natural outcome of the inevitable 
 comparison between myself and the great 
 Ulysses, forced upon me by circumstances 
 over which I have no control. Dubbed 
 Ulysses derisively, and also in token of affec- 
 tion, it has become a habit with me to see 
 comparisons and contrasts that have relation- 
 ship between my real prosaic career and the 
 imaginary narrative that sets forth the ad- 
 ventures of the poetic hero. I protest to the 
 reader that no special vanity of mine under- 
 lies these references to my own adventures 
 nor in my association of them with those of 
 the great pagan ideal. ^' A modern Ulysses" 
 is a nickname as well as a term of endear- 
 ment; it represents the scoff of Welby, 
 as well as the affection that belongs to a 
 pet name ; and it keeps green the memory 
 of the dear old gentleman who was 
 reading the story of Ulysses to the boy in 
 the velvet frock in the first chapter of this 
 veritable but ill-constructed history, this
 
 OUTSIDE THE GROTTO. 191 
 
 salmagundi of autobiographic notes, which 
 relies for its taste and flavour upon facts that 
 are flung together without the sophistication 
 of literary artifice or design. 
 
 I sat at my bedroom window far into the 
 night, in a half-dazed meditative condition 
 of mind, not thinking of anything in par- 
 ticular and yet about everything ; I sat as a 
 culprit might, awaiting his sentence, with 
 the feeling that to-morrow is weighted with 
 his destiny, that when the sun shines once 
 again he will learn whether his sentence is 
 to be death or liberty. 
 
 As the moon mounted higher in the 
 heavens, and tree and hill below threw about 
 them deeper shadows, I surveyed my life in 
 a dreamy inconsequent fashion, and found 
 in all my hopes but one goal, the love of 
 this unknown woman. I had not yet crossed 
 those hills of my infancy and exploited the 
 mystery of their wonderful palace ; but here 
 in the land of song and romance I found myself 
 face to face with the mystery that is next to 
 the mystery of death — love. For my uncle's
 
 192 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 sake I could not help a passing regret that 
 the divine passion had not been kindled by 
 the woman he would have chosen for me. 
 What bliss had this lady of the Italian villa 
 been old Dunstan's daughter ! 
 
 I suppose I entertained myself with these 
 thoughts and fancies chiefly that I might get 
 through the night without actually going 
 mad ; for Father Gabriello had poisoned my 
 imagination with strange doubts and fears ; 
 he had given increased significance of ill omen 
 to my lady's last words. I recalled her 
 sudden change of manner and the cynicisim 
 of her reference to the current coin of flat- 
 tery or so-called courtship ; and it required 
 my acutest remembrances of her tender 
 looks and the pressure of her soft hand to 
 dissipate the augury of misery I found in 
 that transition from sunshine to shadow, the 
 latter deepened and made terrible by the 
 advice sought and obtained from my re- 
 verend friend of the inn. 
 
 I fell asleep at last and dreamed that the 
 Villa Verona was Calypso's grotto, the scent
 
 OUTSIDE THE GROTTO. 193 
 
 of the surrounding woods the cedar and 
 frankincense of the cavern's odorous breath, 
 which already greeted me as I thrust aside 
 the deepening vines that screened the magic 
 portals. 
 
 VOL. I.
 
 194 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 INSIDE THE GROTTO. 
 
 I have seen the day break in many 
 lands, in the tropics and amidst fields of ice 
 off Labrador, in the New World, and in the 
 Old ; at sea and on the mountain tops ; in 
 peace and in war ; on Mont Blanc and on 
 Primrose Hill ; in the Malay Archapelago 
 and camping out luxuriously on the Upper 
 Thames. But one sunset and one sunrise 
 live in my recollection for ever. The golden 
 west and the crimson east ; the pale moon 
 in a yellow aerial sea; the first red beams of 
 the risen god ; shall I ever forget those 
 mysterious lights and shadows and adorn- 
 ments of natural objects that belong to my
 
 INSIDE THE GROTTO. 195 
 
 night and day in the Calypso's island of my 
 earliest travels ? 
 
 When I started for the Villa Verona 
 tlie world was in fall possession of the sun. 
 Still it was very early. The people of the 
 inn were only just awake. White pigeons 
 were calling to each other. The dew 
 glistened on tree and flower, and dripped 
 from the eaves of house and barn. The 
 bells at Father Gabriello's church were 
 sounding for some holy office, an early mass 
 perhaps. I tried to think wisely of my 
 situation, imported into my intellectual re- 
 connaisance thoughts of my uncle and of 
 Helen Dunstan, and made an e:ffort to ima- 
 gine myself a real Ulysses under an en- 
 chantment which it was my duty to shake 
 off. It was of no avail. I had never seen 
 the world look so lovely, so fresh, never 
 known it smell so sweet as on this morning. 
 After a hurried bath and a scanty meal I 
 set off for the grotto, the strange villa, the 
 enchanted house, the cave of Darthula- 
 Calypso. The rivulet met me with a joyous 
 o2
 
 196 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 song, the birds flew before me, peasants 
 saluted me, the world was alive and full of 
 hope and promise. 
 
 Presently the world became silent and I 
 was alone. I had entered the magic portals 
 of my goddess's domain, the garden-like 
 woods in which the woman who had en- 
 thralled me had control and command. 
 
 It was an old Italian villa, seared with 
 age, beautiful in decay. I stood in front of 
 it. No sign of life. The terrace walls were 
 adorned with quaint broken sculpture. Trail- 
 ing creepers and flowers made picturesque 
 efibrts to hide the ravages of time. 
 
 The spirit of the great ages past seemed 
 to brood over the spot. A trickling fountain 
 murmured among a bed of clustering roses. 
 It was silence emphasised by sound. I flung 
 myself down under the shade of a spreading 
 palm. 
 
 Under the impressive influence of the 
 scene contrasts between it and the environs 
 of Calypso's cavern stirred my inner con- 
 sciousness, presenting themselves to my
 
 INSIDE THE GROTTO. 197 
 
 imagination without effort. I thought of 
 nothing. My mind was passive. I was in 
 a new world. I let my thoughts drift as 
 they listed. No sensual, nor even sensuous, 
 suggestion shadowed this spot, sacred by 
 the lapse of time, dedicated to the sub- 
 limity of a pure and noble art. The 
 ever-new delights of Calypso's island were 
 not here, nor did the violets recall the 
 simile of blue veins enamelling the smooth 
 breasts of fragrant meads. Such inspiration 
 as might be found, in the grove that clipped 
 the grotto of my love round about, was 
 chaste and dealt with the higher life, its 
 silent voices freighted with memories of a 
 past, the relics of which have a tender pathos 
 and the reflected light of which is the halo 
 of modern art. 
 
 As the shadow on the dial that spread 
 itself to the sun on a mouldering shaft 
 (whence the fountain trickled among the 
 waking roses still wet with dew) travelled 
 slowly along its ancient course I roused 
 myself to chide the unworthy thoughts that
 
 198 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 had more than once afflicted my fancy, in 
 regard to the living soul that was the centre 
 of this classic spot. Just as my heart had 
 offered up a stinging protest to my brain, 
 vowing the lady to be all that is fair and 
 good and true and pure, the villa gave such 
 living tokens of life as Wertz must once have 
 seen before he painted that dream of female 
 beauty which is entitled Le Bouton Hose. 
 
 A lattice was flung open. A woman 
 looked out upon the garden, a fair hand 
 drawing a white robe about her bosom. 
 You know the picture in the Brussels 
 Gallery, the figure at the open lattice which 
 redeems the surrounding horrors? Then 
 picture the sight that riveted my rapturous 
 gaze ! 
 
 And our eyes met almost at the same 
 moment. The surprise and delight were 
 surely mutual. Her glance was a message 
 of love; and only a message, a lightning 
 flash ; for she withdrew on the instant ; but 
 she left her picture on the retina of my soul. 
 Had I the painter s art I could limn it now,
 
 INSIDE THE GROTTO. 199 
 
 though the memory of it is somewhat dimmed 
 by a more saint-like presentment of the same 
 lovely face. Other pictures in Life's ka- 
 leidoscope have also claimed places in my 
 memory, other voices have also touched my 
 heart. 
 
 I look back to the earlier time however. 
 Presently the carved doors of the villa are 
 opened. I am beckoned by a servant, the 
 major-domo of my princess's retainers, the 
 chief of the Darthula-Colypso bodyguard. 
 I enter the marble halls. Fruit and wine, 
 milk and honey, are placed before me. The 
 room is open to a terrace that gives upon a 
 garden of sweet flowers shut in by over- 
 hanging trees, that shade it from the burn- 
 ing sun. Here there is again the quiet music 
 of trickling fountains. Examined in detail 
 the room is no doubt rich in art treasures ; 
 but the general effect is repose, rest, quiet. 
 The atmosphere of it lulls the senses. Time 
 passes here, as it were, without leaving a 
 wrinkle, without disturbing a tone of colour, 
 moving onwards as it does over the dial-
 
 200 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 plate ; and yet you feel and know that Time 
 has lingered day after day in that outer gar- 
 den for centuries, and that the silent god has 
 heard in this room from their own lips the 
 songs of poets whose memories are enshrined 
 in their works, but whose bodies have re- 
 turned to the dust from whence they sprang. 
 
 After a little while I hear the trailing 
 garments of my love sweep the mosaic floors. 
 She stands by my side, a vision of mature 
 beauty, a model of artistic pose and grace. 
 
 ''Your constancy touches me," she says, 
 with a smile, '' for I was cruel to you in those 
 last words."' 
 
 '' You could not be cruel to any one, 
 much less to a worshipper,'' I answer. 
 
 '' Have you spent the night in my garden 
 --surely not ?" 
 
 *^No, I cannot claim to have been so 
 happy ; I came here soon after sunrise." 
 
 *' And you think the gardens pretty ? " 
 
 '' I have never seen anything more 
 beautiful." 
 
 " Not the gardens and meadows of your
 
 INSIDE THE GROTTO. 201 
 
 native place — the Arcadia you told me 
 of?" 
 
 ^^No, nothing.'' 
 
 ^^ Ah ! I fear it is I who have enthralled 
 your critical faculties, and blunted your sense 
 of comparison. Love conquers reason. I 
 believe I was once in love." 
 
 She paused and looked at me. I did not 
 reply. 
 
 ^^ You do not like to hear that confession. 
 Men are selfish. They are vain, too, since 
 every individual one of them thinks he pos- 
 sesses the one particular attraction that is to 
 rivet the attention of one particular woman." 
 
 ^' Men are what women make them," I said. 
 
 ^^ No, no ! you reverse the proverb.'' 
 
 She was sitting on a low seat in the 
 shadow of a sunblind by the open terrace- 
 window; her dress, a pale soft blue Indian 
 silk. At the end of her short speeches she 
 fanned herself very quietly with a fan of a 
 similar material to her dress, but painted in 
 delicate water-colours, with designs of birds, 
 and leaves, and flowers.
 
 202 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 *^ I wish I might be so blessed of fortune 
 as to reverse it then in your case," I said, 
 with a boldness that came of a great effort to 
 resist a tendency to stammer like a boy, 
 instead of laying siege to the goddess of my 
 idolatry like a, man. 
 
 And all at once I thought of Verona and 
 Juliet, of the old romance, and encouraged 
 myself to speak what my heart dictated. 
 
 ^' There was a time when you might have 
 done so," she said. 
 
 '' Let the time that is lost go," I answered, 
 ^'it is without recall; those lovers in the 
 story, which might have been inaugurated in 
 this very palace, looked forward into the 
 future ; and they were model lovers for all 
 ages." 
 
 '' Do you think so ? " she answered, and I 
 remember now the touch of critical doubtful- 
 ness there was in the tone of her voice, though 
 then I only heard its music. "You have 
 been to Verona ? " 
 
 ^^ And walked in the footsteps of the 
 Capulets and the Montagues," I answered.
 
 INSIDE THE GROTTO. 203 
 
 ^' but never felt the depth of the poet's 
 tale until I knew the Villa Verona, two hours 
 
 ago 
 
 'J 
 
 " Let us walk upon the terrace," she said. 
 
 As we moved out into the air a flock of 
 white doves sailed down almost at her feet, 
 alighting on the balustrades. She returned 
 to the table, where dainty fare had been 
 placed for me, and fed them with crumbs. 
 The music of a harp rippled out upon 
 the sunny air from a distant wing of the 
 villa. 
 
 ^'You like music?" she asked, as she 
 led the way to a shaded corner of the gar- 
 den, a bower set into a crumbling wall, 
 half hidden with trailing vines and floral 
 creepers. 
 
 '^ I am human," I said. 
 
 ^^ These chords might be the creation of 
 angelic fingers," she said, pointing to a chair, 
 and at the same time taking an adjacent 
 seat. 
 
 I paused, for it was evident she mshed 
 to say something of the harpist.
 
 204 A MODERN TJLTSSES. 
 
 ^^ Old Fridoline is a perfect mistress of 
 that most delightful of instruments. She is 
 not too pleasant to look upon, but she is 
 devotion itself." 
 
 ^^ The old lady who accompanies you 
 when you drive ? " 
 
 ^' The same," she said, ^^ you do not like 
 her." 
 
 '' I like anything you like, and am pre- 
 pared to do homage even to Madame Frido- 
 line," I replied. 
 
 ^* She is wrinked and old, but age has 
 softened not hardened her heart. She has 
 been a mother to me, though in some things 
 she has not always been true to my interests. 
 She has an infirmity, a desire to amass 
 money. Why she is miserly is her own 
 secret. She has had a strange career. Once 
 she held a high position in French society, 
 though when a girl she wandered from town 
 to town with her father, street musicians. 
 A composer, and an executant of the highest 
 merit, she is clever and learned, and ac- 
 complished in many ways. Poor old Frido-
 
 INSIDE THE GROTTO. 205 
 
 line ! I do not know what I should do with- 
 out her. 
 
 " Do you play upon any instrument ? 
 
 ^* Very imj^erfectly upon the violoncello^ 
 in memory, I think, of my father." 
 
 ^' He played?" 
 
 ^' Yes, en amateur P 
 
 ^' When you were a boy at Scars- 
 dale ? " 
 
 '' Yes." 
 
 '^ Let us talk of those happy days." 
 
 '^ Since it pleases you, yes," I said, '-' but 
 they were not happy days always ; may we 
 not talk of yours ? " 
 
 ^^ Oh yes," she answered, ^'we have 
 time enough, and to spare ; when do you 
 leave Baveno ? '' 
 
 ^' When you order me to go." 
 
 ^' Do you always obey orders ? " 
 
 ^^When they are orders that should be 
 obeyed." 
 
 ^' You did when a boy ? " 
 
 ^* Sometimes. But let us talk of you 
 when you were a girl."
 
 206 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 " Be content," she said, and she looked at 
 me, with an earnestness that I had noticed, 
 once before, when she was listening to my 
 first passionate avowals. 
 
 ^^I am if only I could know that you 
 loved me." 
 
 She moved as if to interrupt me. 
 
 ^^Let me speak, for my words are the 
 inspiration of that look you gave me; nay 
 let me speak," I said. 
 
 I took her hand and gazed into her face, 
 and her lips trembled. 
 
 '' Do not tell me I have only this moment 
 seen you. Do not tell me I know nothing 
 of you. We are in the land of Romeo and 
 Juliet. He had loved before, and at the 
 height of his passion for Rosaline he saw and 
 loved Juliet. He had only that moment 
 seen her ; she was the daughter of his 
 bitterest foe ; and she gave him love for 
 love, though she knew him to be the enemy 
 of her house. No such barriers separate 
 us ; if there be any others that I know 
 not of bid me leap them, and I am
 
 INSIDE THE GROTTO. 207 
 
 on the other side before you can com- 
 mand me.'' 
 
 I covered her hand with kisses. The 
 next moment she was in my arms. 
 
 •^ I do love you, Horace Durand," she 
 whispered, '' and have ever! "
 
 208 
 
 CHAPTER IV. . 
 
 THE SHADOWS OF COMING REVELATIONS. 
 
 And, as she thus ministered to my bliss 
 in this tender confession, the tears rained 
 down her cheeks. She sobbed convulsively, 
 as if some terrible weight of grief afflicted 
 her, rather than the joy my vain imagina- 
 tion associated with the triumph of my hot, 
 persistent, and impassionate wooing. 
 
 Fridoline's harp, which had made inter- 
 mittent music in the outer sunshine, now 
 stopped altogether, and I was glad to 
 see the dame approach us, so hysterically 
 was she weeping, this heroine of my Italian 
 romance.
 
 SHADOWS OF COMING REVELATIONS. 209 
 
 ^'Come, come, love, this will never do," 
 said the Dame, '^ what is the matter ? " 
 
 She did not answer. 
 
 '^ Judith, my dear, Judith,'' said the 
 Dame, patting her hands, *^ Listen! I have 
 news for you, news ! " 
 
 There was something very earnest in the 
 Dame's manner, and in her emphasising of the 
 words *^ news for you." 
 
 She opened her eyes and looked up. 
 
 *' A messenger from London." 
 
 She rose to her feet, leaning upon my 
 shoulder. 
 
 '^ Only Simmons ! '' said the Dame. 
 
 My love trembled from head to foot. 
 
 '^ Where is he— the messenger?" she 
 asked. 
 
 " In my room by this time ; I will detain 
 him till you ring.'' 
 
 ^^ It is well," said my love, ^' it is well ; 
 I am not sorry." 
 
 The Dame looked anxiously at her lovely 
 mistress, and then, kissing her on the fore- 
 head, left her. 
 
 VOL. I. P
 
 210 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 ^* We will walk a little way through the 
 grounds, Horace," said the dear lady of the 
 villa, *^and then we will say au revoir, and 
 you will come agMq^ to-night." 
 
 She took my arm and we wandered into 
 a grove of olives that were banked, as it 
 were, by a forest of pines, through the red 
 trunks of which came the warm sun. 
 
 ^^I think I have been wrong, Horace, to 
 encourage you to declare your love so fer- 
 vently, and to offer me marriage." 
 
 " No, no," I protested. 
 
 '^ It is infinitely sweet to me," she went 
 on, ''but there was a time when it would 
 have been sweeter and very welcome ! " 
 
 " And is it not welcome now ? " I asked. 
 " Do not mock me." 
 
 '' It is welcome as the sun to the flower ; 
 welcome as the rain to the parched earth ; 
 but sometimes sun and rain come too 
 late." 
 
 She spoke with a sad look in her eyes, 
 and there was a deep pathetic music in her 
 voice.
 
 SHADOWS OF COMING REVELATIONS. 211 
 
 '^ You make my heart ache, when it 
 should be leaping with joy," I said. 
 
 ^' It would be better for you to conquer 
 this love, Horace ; better for both of us. I 
 ought to have resisted it, but, oh, it was so 
 sweet; so true, so unselfish ; and there are 
 memories connected with it that make it all 
 the more welcome." 
 
 '' Memories ! " I said, ^' What memories?" 
 
 ^^Some day you shall know; it is the 
 only bitter in the sweet of this love of ours 
 that you cannot guess them," she said, turn- 
 ing her tearful eyes upon me. 
 
 '^ I only know that I love you and shall 
 ever," I said, '^ and I have no memories 
 worth recalling beyond the moment when 
 you first let me tell you so.'' 
 
 '' Horace," she said, suddenly, ^^ Fate 
 may part us. Should it do so, will you try 
 and think of me as you think now ? Will 
 you let the recollection of our love be as 
 sweet as it is to-day, surrounded with the 
 blessed halo of a pure devotion ? " 
 
 '' My darling ! " was all I could say.. 
 p 2
 
 212 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 Her head lay for a moment upon my 
 shoulder. She turned her face towards me. 
 I kissed her. 
 
 ^^ Good bye ! " she murmured, " my dear 
 Horace ! " 
 
 *^ Good bye ! " I exclaimed. 
 
 ^^For the present," she said; ^^I must 
 leave you now to receive this importunate 
 visitor from London." 
 
 ^^ But I am to see you again this 
 evening ? " 
 
 '^ I hope so," she said, adding, ^' why 
 should a momentary parting like this dis- 
 tress one so much, when there is an inevit- 
 able day that comes and parts us for ever ? 
 We are not the first who have breathed to 
 each other their mutual loves and hopes and 
 fears in this old palace ; and Romeo and 
 Juliet is an old, old story." 
 
 While these never-to-be-forgotten mo- 
 ments flew by, Madame Fridoline had laid 
 her harp aside to take part in the following
 
 SHADOWS OF COMING REVELATIONS. 213 
 
 episode, the details of which I learned the 
 same day at the inn. 
 
 An English gentleman has made his way 
 into the entrance hall of the villa. He is a 
 clean-shaven, well-built, but somewhat ascetic 
 looking man of about fifty ; dark hair closely 
 cropped, a strong though slightly pointed 
 chin, thin lips, a bright bead-like eye, the 
 tout ensemble being what would be called 
 distinguished and manly, yet with a certain 
 judicial coldness that is noticeable in not a 
 few successful members of the Bar. 
 
 '' Madame Fridoline will see you/' says 
 the major-domo of the house, ^^ this way, 
 thark you." 
 
 It is an ante-room adjoining the principal 
 saloon into which the visitor is shown, and 
 when the harpist and faithful servant of the 
 lady of the villa joins him there occurs the 
 following dialogue. 
 
 ^' It is a great surprise, how did you 
 come here, my lord ? " 
 
 ^^ Don't call me my lord," answered the
 
 214 A MODERN TJLTSSES. 
 
 visitor, '^ my name is Mr. Simmons to you 
 and to your mistress." 
 
 ^^ But since you have been raised to the 
 Bench?" 
 
 ^^Ah, you think that gives you a hold 
 upon me ; but it does not, my discreet janitor 
 of the temple of Venus." 
 
 ^^ It will serve you now better than the 
 name of Simmons, to be what you are, my 
 lord." 
 
 ^^Contumacious, eh? Well, no matter 
 since I have unearthed you. Where is 
 Judith?" 
 
 '^ Madame is out." 
 
 ^'Madame is at home," answers the 
 visitor, with an air of authority. 
 
 ^' Madame is at home to no one," is the 
 equally firm answer. 
 
 *^ Then consider me No One, good Frido- 
 line, and announce me forthwith." 
 
 '^ That would be to forget your lordship's 
 dignity and to discount my own veracity." 
 
 '^ If you were beautiful as you are clever, 
 Fridoline, and young as you are old "
 
 SHADOWS OF COMING REVELATIONS. 215 
 
 '' I should not condescend to bandy 
 words with you," says the dame. 
 
 ^^ Sharp as ever," says the visitor, ^' well 
 well, we were talking of dignity and 
 veracity ; my dignity is of no moment, your 
 veracity is ; so tell the fair Judith that 
 Somebody has called, and put your smiles 
 into the message. Here is a souvenir from 
 London to help you.'' 
 
 He gives her a Bank of England note. 
 She looks at it. 
 
 ^' It cannot be said against you, Simmons, 
 or judge, counsel or my lord, that you were 
 ever ungenerous," she says. 
 
 '^ Simmons, Fridoline, Simmons, if you 
 love me." 
 
 '^ You give me fifty pounds to announce 
 you ; I must do so whether you give me the 
 money or not," she says pocketing the 
 note. 
 
 '^ You thaw?" 
 
 '^ I do, I am a woman.' 
 
 '^ And know ^he value of money ? " 
 
 ^' And peace ; I hate to be worried."
 
 216 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 ^^ Sit down then and let us chat a 
 moment. You are in hiding here ? " 
 
 ^^ In retreat." 
 
 '' Grown tired of the gay world ? " 
 
 ^' Madame has become religious." 
 
 ^andeed!" 
 
 '' She has retired from the stage for 
 ever." 
 
 ^^ Nonsense." 
 
 ^' It is true." 
 
 *^ And I have just bought the lease of the 
 Eegent Theatre." 
 
 ''Why?" 
 
 '' To give it to Judith." 
 
 ''No, truly?" 
 
 " Indeed I have." 
 
 " She will not take it." 
 
 " She shall." 
 
 "Madame has resolved, only this very 
 day, never to return to London." 
 
 " We will see," says the visitor; "but tell 
 me what brought you here ? " 
 
 " Chance. We had travelled far and 
 wide. This villa attracted Madame. A
 
 SHADOWS OF COMING REVELATIONS. 217 
 
 priest who lives hereabouts, and knew her in 
 England, recommended it to her, as quiet, 
 out of the world, the very spot for her 
 mood." 
 
 '' And how do we spend our time outside 
 this charmed circle of life ? " 
 
 *' We are good, very good." 
 
 ^^ What a reformation ! " 
 
 '^ We no longer believe in gaiety, we no 
 longer intrigue; and we hate all plays, except 
 a few passages of the classic and poetic 
 drama." 
 
 ^'Delightful! How then do we get 
 through the long weary days of virtue?" 
 
 ^' We say our prayers." 
 
 The visitor laughs. 
 
 u ^Yg gQ ^Q mass, and take walks of con- 
 templation." 
 
 The visitor laughs aloud. The Dame is 
 encouraged to still further burlesque her 
 kind and trustful mistress. 
 
 '^ We do a little tapestry ; we read good 
 books, and " 
 
 The Dame drops her voice, and looks
 
 218 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 around as if in fear that she may be over- 
 heard. 
 
 '^ Yes," says the visitor, leaning towards 
 her. 
 
 ^^ And we are in love ! " 
 
 The visitor shows his disappointment. 
 
 '^ Is that so new an incident that you make 
 a mystery of it ? " he asks. 
 
 ^' It is quite new. There is love andlove 
 I believe ; this new love is true love." 
 
 '' No, you astonish me." 
 
 *' Do I ? then I ought to feel proud." 
 
 ^^ Do not pause to air your wit, dear 
 Fridoline, tell me of this love " 
 
 ^^ Poor dear kind soul, I pity her. She 
 has fought against it as a prisoner might 
 against his bars the first time the dungeon 
 door closes upon him." 
 
 '' You have never experienced the sensa- 
 tion, Dame Fridoline ? " 
 
 ^' 1 have been what you fine gentlemen 
 call a vagabond, in my time." 
 
 ^^ A play-actor, Fridoline ? they are 
 vagabonds still according to law."
 
 SHADOWS OP COMING REVELATIONS. 219 
 
 ^^ And deserve to be, so long as they 
 allow such as you to make the theatre an an- 
 nexe to your vices." 
 
 Fridoline rises as she speaks, and con- 
 fronts the visitor with an unaccustomed flash 
 in her usually dull eye. 
 
 ^' A stirring sentiment, and well ex- 
 pressed, Fridoline ; but they do allow it, 
 they do allow it, old friend; and as life 
 would be tolerable, somebody says, but 
 for its pleasures, it would assuredly be un- 
 bearable but for its vices. But let us talk 
 of this love you mentioned.'^ 
 
 "• I will not." 
 
 ''Yes you will." 
 
 "No, I wont." 
 
 " Where do you invest your savings, 
 Fridoline ? " 
 
 ''Where?" 
 
 " Yes, where? There is no stock so safe 
 now or that pays so reliable a dividend as 
 United States Bonds." 
 
 The Dame is silent, but she taps the 
 floor with her foot.
 
 220 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 ^^ You once told me you had an ambition 
 to save five thousand pounds ?" 
 
 ^* I have a reason for it ; I am no miser." 
 " I am rich ; I will help you. Let us go 
 back to Madame's new whim." 
 
 *^ It is not a whim ; it is her first love." 
 '^ I thought you said it was new." 
 '' Old and new, the revival of an old 
 flame, and it burns with the brightness of 
 truth and youth. If there be truth in the 
 re-birth which the Church preaches, Judith 
 Travers would be worthy of the love she 
 has won ; though I do not hold her unworthy 
 of any man that breathes." 
 
 '^ Nor would she. Dame Fridoline, in a 
 less conventional world than that we have 
 had the misfortune to be born into." 
 
 " Heaven help poor women ! It is a 
 world in which their chances of happiness 
 are few and their certainties of misery 
 many." 
 
 '^ Justice herself has begun to acknow- 
 ledge that, and the law is making provisions 
 to increase the chances you speak of. And
 
 SHADOWS OF COMING REVELATIONS. 221 
 
 who is the happy being who has touched the 
 heart of Judith Travers in earnest, as you 
 think ?" 
 
 '^ Ah, you can ask her that yourself. I 
 have told you no more, I do believe, than 
 she will tell you, nor half as much. But " 
 
 ^^Yes?" 
 
 ^' You said you would help me with that 
 ambition of mine you were pleased to 
 mention, Mr. Simmons." 
 
 '' Ah, yes; h^re it is." 
 
 It is a small note this time that is 
 placed in Dame Fridoline's wrinkled hand. 
 She looks at it without seeming to notice 
 that it is the smallest they issue from an 
 English Bank. The tinkle of a distant bell 
 is heard. She takes her revenge. 
 
 "• There ! I have held you in conversa- 
 tion sufficiently long for the visit of the happy 
 being, whom you mentioned, to come to a 
 close ; madame is now at liberty and will 
 see you ; the happy being has retired by the 
 private path to the lake." 
 
 The visitor bites his lip and follows the
 
 222 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 servant, who enters the room with orders to 
 conduct his lordship to the presence of the 
 
 lady of the villa. 
 
 # * * 
 
 Such was the account which Mr. Miller 
 the Q.C., of my " Feast of St. Partridge " 
 reminiscences gave me of his interview with 
 Dame Fridoline. He was the ^^ Simmons" 
 and the '^ Judge " of the dialogue. I found 
 him at the inn almost as soon as I returned ; 
 for I had walked leisurely from the villa 
 wrapped up in my happiness. 
 
 '' So/' he said, ^^ it is you, my dear 
 young friend, I am glad to see you ! Let us 
 talk frankly w^ith each other. I love your 
 uncle ; I respect you. If I had known as 
 much of you as of Dick Grantley I should 
 love you. But we will improve our friend- 
 ship. You are in trouble. I must help you. 
 Your disease is a violent one ; it requires a 
 violent remedy. I have just come from the 
 Villa Verona.'' 
 
 With this brief introduction, Mr. Justice 
 Miller (for he had recently been exalted to
 
 SHADOWS OF COMING REVELATIONS. 223 
 
 the bench) exacting from me a promise that I 
 would hear all he had to say, gave me the 
 above graphic but heartless sketch of the 
 first part of his visit to the villa. During 
 the narrative I had to pace the apartment 
 to keep down the expressions of my indig- 
 nation ; but considering my state of mind I 
 bore with commendable patience his ruth- 
 less laceration of my feelings. 
 
 '' And now," he said, '' if you like I will 
 give you an account of my interview with 
 the lady herself." 
 
 *^ I do not wish to hear any more," I 
 said. 
 
 " Better hear all ; you have probably 
 heard the worst." 
 
 ^^ I am very wretched," I answered. 
 
 *' Of course you are; but you will re- 
 cover ; you are taking your punishment with 
 a calmness that promises a speedy cure. 
 Shall I go on?" 
 
 ^^ You are a cruel physician," I answered. 
 
 '^ My office just now is that of surgeon," 
 he said.
 
 224 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 ^' Your knife can never cut her image 
 from my heart." 
 
 ^* Of course not; nor would I wish to 
 indulge in such mutilation. But as your 
 uncle's old friend" 
 
 ^^ It is your duty to torture the nephew," 
 I said. 
 
 '^ If it is for the nephew's good, certainly," 
 responded the judge. 
 
 *^ Continue! I am on the rack whether 
 you tell me more or not. But beware how 
 you overstep the borderland between friend- 
 ship and enmity, between respect and con- 
 tempt, between love and hatred ; you think 
 I am calm, patient, philosophical ; don't 
 count too much on my patience. 
 
 *' I will only count upon your good sense 
 and upon the love and duty and respect you 
 owe to honest Dick Grantley, and to the un- 
 blemished name you inherited from Maxi- 
 milian Durand," said the judge. 
 
 " You must leave me to my own inter- 
 pretation of duty, and I do not need the 
 stimulus of an exordium upon my father's
 
 SHADOWS OF COMING REVELATIONS. 225 
 
 lionour, nor is it necessary to remind me of 
 the respect I owe to his memory." 
 
 ^^ Well said ; we are getting on," an- 
 swered the judge, lighting a cigar and 
 calling for a bottle of wine, adding as the 
 waiter left the room, '' I have only two 
 hours at my disposal, we will therefore 
 waste no more time." 
 
 ^* You leave Baveno to-day?" 
 
 '^ Two hours hence. It is almost ac- 
 cidental that I am here." 
 
 ^^ I am sorry the accidental circumstance 
 did not take you elsewhere." 
 
 ^^You are inhospitable; but as the old 
 i^riend of your uncle " 
 
 ^^I know, I know," I said interrupting 
 him. 
 
 '^ Of course you do,'' he responded with 
 a smile, '' take a cigar." 
 
 I took a cigar. By the time his narrative 
 was at an end I had almost eaten it. 
 
 VOL. 1. Q
 
 226 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE JUDGE COMPLETES HIS SKETCH OF JUDITH 
 TRAVERS. 
 
 *' Why did I come here, you ask ? 
 During my studies at the Bar I often en- 
 gaged in amateur detective operations. I 
 liked the work. Scotland Yard liked me. 
 The disappearance of Judith Travers, the 
 famous comedienne of the no less famous 
 Regent Theatre, piqued my feelings as well 
 as my skill at explorations. Nobody could 
 find her. I suspect they had not tried. 
 They were under orders. It was my business 
 to discover her. 
 
 "You did not know that she is an actress ? 
 Of course not. You thought her a princess
 
 SKETCH OF JUDITH TRAVERS. 227 
 
 in her own right. Well she is better than 
 some princesses. She is one of the most 
 generons women that lives. I have known 
 her nearly seven years. 
 
 '^ Did I know her when first I met you at 
 Warington Manor ? Yes, she was the rage of 
 London at that time. Is it possible that you 
 have not heard of Judith Travers ? Not seen 
 her portrait in the shop windows ? Oh, you 
 have ! But you did not know that this was 
 the lovely Judith ? Ah, well, it is a polite 
 education to know her, and there is no harm 
 in your going a little mad about her. But 
 marriage is out of the question. There, 
 there, don't interrupt the court. If London 
 could have heard Judith's confession to me 
 this morning, you would be the envy of 
 every man in the metropolis ; yes, and the 
 envy of some of the women too; for Miss 
 Travers is the most popular artist that ever 
 trod the stage, in my time at all events. 
 
 *' I always vowed that whenever I should 
 be honoured by advancement to the dis- 
 tinction of becoming one of Her Majesty's 
 q2
 
 228 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 judges I would make Judith Travers a 
 present of the lease of the Regent Theatre, 
 marry, settle down, and be, in every way, 
 worthy of the Bench. It may be my lot one 
 day, like the judge in Whittier's poem, to 
 look back from the matrimonial height, where 
 I shall perch my hopes, to the ground, upon 
 which some other poet says Happiness 
 oftener builds her nest. But the performance 
 of duty is the first essential of earthly bliss. 
 You think I am talking with my tongue in 
 my cheek ? Not at all. 
 
 ^' It is not to be wondered at that you 
 are over head and ears in love with Judith 
 Travers. Why she should be over head and 
 ears in love with you is surprising. I found 
 her in what I will venture to call a statuesque 
 frame of mind, cold as an icicle, except when 
 she spoke of you. ' For the first time in my 
 wretched life ' she said, ^ for the first time I 
 love and am beloved. The dream may not 
 last, will not, cannot, for he is sure to dis- 
 cover who I am, what I am.' The last three 
 words were said with a pathetic force, which
 
 SKETCH OP JUDITH TRAVERS. 229 
 
 she never reached in her highest flights of 
 domestic comedy, not even in tragedy itself, 
 though her Constance in King John was a 
 fine example of acted feeling. ^ I could have 
 wished,' she said, ' that this one romance of 
 my life might have lasted a little longer, it 
 has been so sweet, and it seemed as if Heaven 
 had sent it to give me a pure and true ideal 
 of manhood, as a wholesome memory, in my 
 retirement from the world.' 
 
 ^^ I ventured to suggest that this was not 
 very complimentary to an old friend like 
 myself. She said it was not intended by 
 way of compliment or reproof. ^ Perhaps,' 
 she continued, ^ you are the least selfish of the 
 men I know ; the only real truth and honour 
 and devotion and self-sacrificing affection I 
 have known have been among my own sex. 
 We are poor creatures, we women, but we 
 have higher capacities of friendship and love 
 than it is possible for man to imagine, much 
 less to realise.' 
 
 '^ Was there no exception to this sweep- 
 ing condemnation, I asked. *None,' she
 
 230 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 said, ^ Not even Mr. Durand ? ' ^ Not even 
 Horace,' she replied. She spoke of you as 
 if she had known you for years instead of 
 only days, but what women and boys call 
 love has a levelling tendency both as regards 
 time and persons. You certainly might be 
 proud of your conquest if the triumph were 
 not so hampered with sentiment. She de- 
 clined my offer of the lease of the Regent 
 Theatre, but condescended to say she appre- 
 ciated my well-intended kindness. A gift 
 of twenty thousand pounds might have called 
 for a warmer acknowledgment, for ten years 
 of the Regent is worth that sum, though she 
 made it worth it. I certainly looked for a 
 more liberal return — for her return to town, 
 at least, as the result of my magnanimity. 
 But women are indeed incomprehensible. 
 It is as well, perhaps ; it will be for me less 
 of a wrench of bachelor habits, easier to with- 
 draw from artistic society, easier to fulfil 
 that old vow of mine ; and ten thousand a 
 year as the endowment of Hymen is not 
 unworthy the consideration of a judge who
 
 SKETCH OF JUDITH TRAVERS. 231 
 
 has not saved half as much as he might have 
 done during a long and lucrative practice. 
 But I am becoming garrulous. My desire 
 has been to spare you unnecessary pain at the 
 discovery that you cannot fulfil the natural 
 desire of tKat ardent and honourable passion 
 which is the privilege and the trouble of 
 youthful minds ; that you cannot make 
 Judith Travers Mrs. Horace Durand."
 
 232 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 COLONEL ERNSTONE TO THE RESCUE. 
 
 I told my tormentor, his learned Lord- 
 ship, my uncle's old friend, that at present I 
 had only his evidence to guide my judg- 
 ment. 
 
 ^'Consider its disinterestedness, its mo- 
 tive, my dear young friend," he answered. 
 
 ^^ I do; but I shall still require another 
 witness." 
 
 '' And where shall you look for that other 
 witness ? " 
 
 '' At the Villa Verona.'' 
 
 *^You will call the lady herself?" he 
 asked. 
 
 ^' She is my other witness," I said.
 
 COLONEL ERNSTONE TO THE RESCUE. 233 
 
 ^^ I do not object," he answered, '^ and I 
 hope some day you will forgive me for my 
 intervention. At present you cannot. Nor 
 will you be able to do so to-morrow, perhaps, 
 nor next week, nor in a year's time ; but you 
 will." 
 
 ^^ We shall see," I said, and on this we 
 parted, the notoriously accomplished lawyer 
 (who to the surprise of those who knew him 
 best had received the vacant judgeship, but 
 who, in the estimation of the general public, 
 had been kept too long outside judicial 
 honours) for a pleasant vacation trip ; I, to 
 count the beads of an early sorrow. 
 
 It was some kind of relief at the moment 
 to hear of the return of Colonel Tom 
 Ernstone. He had met the judge on the 
 road, the one going, the other coming. 
 Somehow he did not care for Miller. He 
 said this as he settled down into his for- 
 mer corner of our common room, and gave 
 orders to his man for dinner. No, he did not 
 like Miller. The famous lawyer always ap- 
 peared to be so confoundedly contented
 
 234 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 with himself. Was never ruffled. Took life 
 as calmly as if the world had been made on 
 purpose for him. Always lucky, and led a 
 notoriously fast life. Did not matter a bit. 
 Went into the best society. Made as much 
 money as he liked. Spent it on himself ; had 
 no relatives, no antecedents, did not care a 
 curse for anything or anybody, except, per- 
 haps, Dick Grantley, though he never visited 
 him. He called shooting at Warington 
 Manor visiting Dick, because the Squire 
 always made a point of dining with the 
 Dunstans the first week in September. Didn't 
 care whether they made him a judge or not ; 
 made more money than judges made ; but a 
 fine thing to be an English judge, and he is as 
 learned and scholarly as any of them they say. 
 He will sentence a poor wretch to be hanged 
 with as much unconcern as he will sum up a 
 case of breach of promise. That is the kind 
 of fellow to go through the campaign of life. 
 No sensibilities, he cannot be wounded ; no 
 heart, he cannot be killed, except in the ordi- 
 nary way ; and he'll choke off fever, small-
 
 COLONEL ERNSTONE TO THE RESCCE. 235 
 
 pox, liver, and all the physical ills of the 
 flesh, with his regular living, his dumb-bells, 
 his horse exercise, his yachting, and his 
 temperance. He was Tom Miller a few years 
 ago — barrister and dramatist. Then he was 
 more barrister than anything. One of the 
 daily papers ^^took him up," as the saying 
 is. He won the big Anglo-Indian Bamboo 
 case '^ off his own bat," they said ; and soon 
 after that he hanged Billikins the poisoner, 
 in spite of the most brilliant address for de- 
 fence ever heard at the criminal Bar, and the 
 evident leaning of the judge towards the 
 prisoner. Then he got silk, and became 
 Mr. Thomas Miller, Q.C., and a dilettante 
 patron of the arts, more particularly of the 
 theatre. Now, by Jupiter, he is my Lord 
 Judge; and he is not surprised; wouldn't 
 he if they made him Lord Chief Justice; 
 dare say they will some day. If he had sen- 
 tenced his first prisoner ^^ to be taken to the 
 place from whence you came, and there be 
 hanged by your neck till you are dead," he 
 could not have looked better satisfied than
 
 236 
 
 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 when I met him an hour ago, and said ^^ How 
 do you do ? " and '' Good bye ! ''—'' And I 
 prefer saying good bye to such cold-blooded 
 inventions of old Harry as Tom Miller any 
 day." 
 
 T suppose Colonel Ernstone was en- 
 couraged to spin out this long review of 
 the judge's career, because I did not inter- 
 rupt him. Indeed, I rather encouraged him 
 by monosyllabic ^' oh's," and '' ah's," and 
 '^ yeses," and ^' I should think so's." The 
 Colonel was emptying his pockets, opening 
 letters, and generally clearing up his quarters, 
 lighting his pipe, and shaking himself clear 
 of the cobwebs of travel, getting ready to 
 enjoy a rest, and to forget that he had been 
 away since the day we first encamped at the 
 snuggest and most pleasant inn- we had met 
 with during our wanderings. When he found 
 it difficult to say any more about Judge 
 Miller, he turned to me in a protesting 
 kind of fashion. 
 
 '^ Have you nothing to say ? " 
 
 *' Speed the parting guest, welcome the
 
 COLONEL ERNSTONE TO THE RESCUE. 237 
 
 new comer ! " I said, '' I think I hate Miller 
 too." 
 
 '^ Oh, I don't hate him," said the Colonel, 
 ^^ but he nettles me ; he is one of the men 
 whose very presence rubs my moral con- 
 sciousness the wrong way." 
 
 '^1 do hate him," I said. 
 
 *^You! And why ? He is one of your 
 uncle's very oldest friends ; but Dick does 
 not like him for all that ; they were in some 
 scrape together in town, years ago, a fight 
 in a gambling hell. Your uncle behaved 
 very generously to Tom ; it is an old scandal, 
 there is nothing in it to be ashamed of, and 
 it is not worth telling ; but Dick Grantley 
 twisted a knife out of the hand of an Italian 
 Count, and probably saved Topi Miller's life. 
 I must do Tom the justice to say that he 
 has always shown his gratitude to Dick, and 
 I know that he volunteered to use his influ- 
 ence in your interest when you go to London 
 to read for the Bar." 
 
 *^I shall not go to London to read for 
 the Bar ; and I shall refuse any assistance 
 he may ojffer me."
 
 238 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 ^^ Nonsense ! I am sorry I spoke about 
 him ; he can make your fortune at the law, 
 and he is not a slave to the conventionalities 
 of the profession ; he is a man of the world, 
 and it is as much his knowledge of life as 
 his legal acumen that has scored for him in 
 consultations, opinions, and also as an advo- 
 cate." 
 
 ^' He has given me my first lesson, and 
 it is evidently worthy of him. Whether he 
 is moved by honest motives or whether he is 
 playing an audacious game of bluff I am in 
 doubt ; and my doubt is mixed up with so 
 much heart-break and depression of spirit 
 that I am just now as miserable a person 
 as your experience or imagination can con- 
 ceive." 
 
 It needed but very small encouragement 
 to induce me to tell the Colonel the entire 
 story of my trouble from first to last. It 
 was then that he sought to console me with 
 that account of his own experiences, with 
 which the reader is already acquainted. 
 When he had finished, the dear, good-hearted
 
 COLONEL ERNSTONE TO THE RESCUE. 239 
 
 fellow, beseemed to think that, having capped 
 my wretched situation, I ought to bear my 
 trouble with a heaven-born resignation. It 
 appeared to me that he found some kind of 
 satisfaction in my misery. 
 
 '^ It brings us closer together, don't you 
 know, and, though I am old enough to be 
 your father, my heart is young enough to 
 beat in sympathy with you. The fellows in 
 London would tell you that I am a cold, 
 cynical brute, not much better than Miller ; 
 but they don't know me; you do; let us 
 shake hands over our misfortunes." 
 
 We shook hands. 
 
 '' But will you not advise me ? '' I asked. 
 
 ^a will," he said. 
 
 ^^Whatoughtltodo?" 
 
 *< I will tell you."
 
 240 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 A DANIEL COME TO JUDGMENT. 
 
 ^^ In the first place I do not believe the 
 insinuations of Mr. Justice Miller." 
 
 '' Thank you," I said eagerly. 
 
 '^ He is selfish and diplomatic." 
 
 ^^Heis." 
 
 ^^I have heard of Judith Travers, and 
 seen her act." 
 
 ^^ She is an actress, then ? " 
 
 '^Yes; but that is no reason why she 
 should not be a perfectly honest woman." 
 
 '' Acting is one of the arts," I said. 
 
 " Truly, and there have been great and 
 good women in the profession." 
 
 " And you think Miss Travers entitled to 
 be ranked among them ? "
 
 A DANIEL COME TO JUDGMENT. 241 
 
 ^^ Yes, I do." 
 
 ^^ I would stake my life on her truth and 
 honour, and on the purity of her life," I 
 said. '' Miller has some selfish purpose to 
 serve in what he has done and said. He 
 may be my rival for her hand." 
 
 Encouraged by Ernstone, there was no 
 imaginable interpretation I was not ready 
 to put upon the new judge's conduct, that 
 could tell in my favour and hers. 
 
 ^^ Hardly that," said Ernstone, ^^but 
 there is no woman who lives her life in the 
 public eye that is not scandalised. An 
 actress is always a mark for envy and 
 slander." 
 
 '' She did not tell me she acted," I said 
 reflectively, ^^ but if she had that would not 
 have made her less beautiful in my eyes. 
 Colonel Ernstone, if I do not marry that 
 woman I shall never marry ! " 
 
 '* Don't make rash vows," responded the 
 colonel, "we are the sport of circumstances. 
 Here comes the dinner." 
 
 " I cannot eat.'' 
 VOL. I. K ♦
 
 242 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 ^^ You must." 
 
 '^ You are hungry, I will walk while you 
 dine." 
 
 ^* You will dine, otherwise I will offer 
 you no more advice. Confound it, man, look 
 at me ! Strong in wind and limb, older 
 than I look, in perfect health ! I have 
 cruised about the world with a greater sorrow 
 than that which can possibly affect you. 
 But I always made a point of dining for 
 the sake of Thdrese, and dining as well as 
 the country in which I happened to dine 
 would let me. Come, come, you need all 
 your wits in your present situation, and wits 
 will not work without wittles, as those bur- 
 lesque-writing fellows would say, though I 
 have known troops do wonderful things 
 on rice and coffee. During our advance on 
 Cawnpore I think our fellows hardly stopped 
 to eat at all, that is, with anything like a 
 show of a comfortable halt, until we were 
 close upon the brutes' entrenchments. I 
 shall never forget Greneral Havelock ordering 
 a halt for two or three hours in the shelter
 
 A DANIEL COME TO JUDGMENT. 243 
 
 of a mango grove, where rations were served 
 and properly cooked, a treat we had not 
 known for a long time. Sufficient liquor 
 was given the men to warm their rations, 
 and pipes and cigars were smoked in some- 
 thing like comfort. After all it is a wise 
 thing to feed well before entering upon an 
 important undertaking." 
 
 I could not help seeing that the colonel 
 was talking to beguile the time, or to divert 
 my thoughts into a new channel. I listened 
 to him with respectful attention, not un- 
 willing to give my mind a rest that I might 
 re-address myself to the chief object of them, 
 perhaps from a new basis. 
 
 '^General Havelock was a humane and 
 a discreet commander. Nana Sahib had 
 taken up a position at a village where the 
 Grand Trunk Road may be said to unite 
 with the principal road to the military can- 
 tonment of Cawnpore. He had blocked 
 both roads by formidable entrenchments 
 and his guns were well mounted all along his 
 positions, which were a number of villages
 
 244 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 skilfully fortified. The Oriental has a habit 
 of expecting you to attack him where it is 
 best for him that you should do so. He 
 throws up his works and plants his guns and 
 calculates that you will come at him there, 
 where he is strongest. And so we should 
 of course if no other course were open. 
 Havelock was unequalled among Indian gene- 
 rals in the matter of selecting where and 
 when to attack, so that his men should sustain 
 a minimum of harm while doing a maximum 
 of damage to the enemy. And, as I said 
 before, he gave us leave to eat and rest 
 and then moving us off, so that we could 
 defile round the Nana's left, our guns were 
 so placed that at the proper moment they 
 were ready for either attack or defence. 
 The movement did not escape the enemy's 
 observation, and he tried to frustrate it ; but 
 we had dined, we had taken a nip of brandy 
 in our coffee, we had smoked and pulled 
 ourselves together, and within less than an 
 hour we had taken Nana's works, captured 
 his guns, and routed his devilish horde.
 
 A DANIEL COME TO JUDGMENT. 245 
 
 But here comes the dinner, and the moral of 
 all this is, that, while great things have been 
 done on empty tummies, much greater have 
 been done after proper rest and refreshment. 
 So fall to, Horace, my boy, and when we 
 have discussed this menu from soup to 
 thrushes, and from birds to coffee, we will 
 fall in and take Miller's entrenchments, 
 capture his guns, and rout him entirely.'' 
 
 ^^ You think we can?" I asked, rising to 
 the music of this cheery promise. 
 
 "• Think ! Why certainly ! as that clever 
 Yankee fellow says in the play," answered 
 the colonel. 
 
 We dined; that is, I ate my dinner. 
 Ernstone enjoyed his. He talked of all 
 kinds of things, with snatches of military ad- 
 venture in his reminiscences, and incidents of 
 London life ; and at last he told me the story 
 of his daughter's engagement with Sir 
 Christopher Hallam ; told me all the details 
 of it and his own story, just, so far as the 
 facts were concerned, as he had told my 
 uncle and as my uncle had already told me.
 
 246 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 This enabled me to think. It was not neces- 
 sary that I should listen to him. I reviewed 
 my own history, tried to examine the im- 
 mediate situation judicially as if I were dis- 
 cussing some other person's doubts and fears 
 and passion ; but it all ended in a dull vague 
 stupid kind of way only, leaving me exactly 
 where I was before I began to think about 
 it. All the time I could hear Ernstone 
 droning out his long yarn ; all the time I 
 could see him blowing clouds of smoke out 
 into the open air ; all the time T could hear 
 the distant music of the rivulet that wound 
 round Villa Verona, just as I heard when I 
 was a boy the humming of the mill-weir at 
 Scarsdale. 
 
 ^' You have told Sir Christopher Hallam 
 all about Th^rese ?" I said presently, when it 
 seemed necessary that I should say some- 
 thing. 
 
 ''No, I have not had the courage; I 
 believe I was one of the first among Nana 
 Sahib's beastly blacks, but I am an awful 
 coward sometimes. I have been all the way
 
 A DANIEL COME TO JUDGMENT. 247 
 
 to Milan chiefly for the purpose of telling 
 Chris everything. I am back again with- 
 out having said a word to him ; and yet you 
 have the folly to ask my advice in your own 
 affairs. I dare say I am not bad at ad- 
 vising ; I know exactly what I ought to do 
 and I would make another fellow do it ; but 
 I am not really plucky myself and that is 
 the truth." 
 
 ^' You have no doubt as to the result 
 when you do tell him ?' ' I said, for the first 
 time getting away from my own affairs. 
 
 ' ' Not in the least, ' ' said Ernstone, ' ' though 
 I hate to tell him ; he is such a happy fellow j 
 never known trouble of any kind. But we 
 will talk no more of Hallam, nor of Therese, 
 heaven bless her, nor of me ; but of you and 
 of Miss Judith Travers. Your uncle is bent 
 on your marrying Helen Dunstan — an excel- 
 lent match in every way. Kind as he is, to 
 thwart him in this might make you enemies 
 instead of friends." 
 
 ^^ Impossible ! " I said, ^^ he is too good 
 and too devoted to me and to my happi- 
 ness."
 
 248 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 " That very devotion makes obedience 
 all the more a virtue on your part, not to 
 say a duty. In case he has talked the match 
 over with Dunstan, and I believe he has, your 
 contumacy would be construed into some- 
 thing more than mere disobedience ; it would 
 be regarded as an insult to the girl her- 
 self." 
 
 '' Oh, no, you are putting a very extreme 
 case," I said. 
 
 '^ I am not, my friend ; view the position 
 from this stand-point, for the sake of argu- 
 ment. Would you brave it for this woman, 
 upon whose reputation there may be a 
 cloud?" 
 
 '^Whatever and whoever she is, my 
 feelings would not alter towards the ideal 
 creature I believe her to be. I am so hard 
 hit that I would take her now and ask no 
 questions, take her on the blind faith ex- 
 pressed in the words of another song, sung 
 by Miss Dunstan on the night when that 
 other ballad touched your heart so keenly."
 
 A DANIEL COME TO JUDGMENT. 249 
 
 I know not, and I ask not. 
 
 If guilt be in thine heart ; 
 I only know I love thee, 
 
 And love thee as thou art. 
 
 It was a woman who spoke the sentiment I 
 know ; I feel it as a man." 
 
 ^'But if all that Miller insinuates is 
 true ? " 
 
 ^' I might hate her then as I hate him ; 
 hate her for showing me Paradise and con- 
 demning me to Hades." 
 
 '^ By which you mean you would not 
 marry her ? " said Ernstone, following my 
 every word with critical sympathy. 
 
 '' I don't know what I mean," I answered. 
 
 ^' Then listen to me ! Keep your appoint- 
 ment. Be frank with her. Tell her all. 
 Show her the position you are in. Ask her 
 advice. If she should then encourage you to 
 cast in your lot with hers, she being resolved 
 to leave the stage ; and if you feel what I felt 
 when a true and honest love took hold of 
 me ; then, by Jupiter, give reins to the 
 impulse of your nature and marry her ! A 
 woman who can interpret nobility of soul in 
 VOL. I. s
 
 250 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 a mimic scene as she can is not the creature 
 Miller would have us believe. If I am any 
 judge of character, Judith Travers will not 
 belie her truthful eyes. She will prove 
 worthy of your love and friendship." 
 
 " My dear friend ! " I exclaimed, seizing 
 the Colonel's hand, '' you only do her common 
 justice. Your generous advice finds an echo 
 in my heart, which tells me it is good. I 
 will go to the Villa now. Wish me good 
 fortune ! " 
 
 *' I do so with all my heart ! " said the 
 
 Colonel. 
 
 # *■ * * •-* • 
 
 The sun had dropped behind the pinns 
 and left the olives dark and sombre, when I 
 reached the gardens of the Villa Verona. The 
 fountain was making plaintive music among 
 the roses by the dial. I listened for Frido- 
 line's harp. A great stillness prevailed. The 
 silence struck me with an indefinable fear. 
 I rang the bell at the portal of the Villa. I 
 don't know why it sounded to me like a 
 knell. No footstep responded to it. I rang
 
 A DANIEL COME TO JUDGMENT. 251 
 
 again and again. No reply. As I stood in 
 doubt Father Gabriello appeared in the 
 garden, coming upon the scene from the 
 point where I had entered. 
 
 ^' Madame has gone away," he said. 
 
 ^^Gone away!" I said, re-echoing his 
 words. 
 
 '' She will not return any more to the 
 Villa Verona," continued the priest, 
 
 ^' Not any more," I said, still echoing him, 
 ^' what do you mean?" 
 
 '' Only what I say ; only what she re- 
 quested me to say ; possibly she has given 
 you more explicit information in this letter." 
 
 I opened the note which he handed to me. 
 The light had almost faded out of the sky. I 
 read, with some difficulty, as follows : — 
 
 ^^ My departure will make you sad, as it 
 " makes me. But it is best. I was wrong 
 "• to receive you at the Villa. Wrong for 
 ^' many reasons. Some day you may know 
 ^* what they are. Then you will pity me. 
 " Why did I encourage you to stake your 
 '•' happiness on an impossible dream ? I can 
 '' hear you ask the question. I can feel its
 
 252 A MODERN ULYSSES. 
 
 ^^ rebuke. There is no justification in my 
 ^' answer. It was so sweet to realise the 
 '' holiness of a pure love. I had not strength 
 '' to resist the temptation of living, if only 
 ^^ for a time, in such an atmosphere. O 
 ^^ forgive me, forgive me. The only bitterness 
 ^ ' in the dream was the knowledge that you 
 '' had forgotten me. To-day, on my journey 
 '' to more restful scenes, what was a bitterness 
 " is so no longer; for it teaches me that Time 
 ^^ carries healing in his wings for bruised 
 " hearts. I beseech the blessed Virgin, that 
 " she will teach you to forget me now as you 
 " forget her who always remembered you ; 
 *^ and in whose voice and touch she recalled 
 " the day when a boy and girl kissed and 
 " parted years ago by the Scarsdale meadows. 
 " Forgive me for this new pang I cause you. 
 ^^ Think of me with the perfume of new-mown 
 ^^ hay, and let your memory of me be asso- 
 ^' ciated with convent bells and sunny skies 
 ^^ away from cruel cities. Goodbye — forgive 
 ** me — forget me ! 
 
 '* Constance Gardner." 
 
 END OF VOL. I. 
 
 ^/ 
 
 /
 
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